Foucault News

Ondrej Ditrych, From discourse to dispositif: States and terrorism between Marseille and 9/11 (2013) Security Dialogue, 44 (3), pp. 223-240.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010613484076

Abstract
This article is a historical study of how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s; under what conditions these statements have been articulated; and what effects the discourses made up of these statements have had on global politics. This includes the constitutive role of the present discourse on what is posited as a terrorism dispositif. The inquiry is inspired by Foucault’s historical method, and comprises the descriptive archaeological analytic focused on the order of the discourse (including basic discourses in which the terrorist subject is constituted) and the genealogical power analysis of external conditions of emergence and variation of discursive series, whose treatment benefits also from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos.

Author Keywords
discourse; Foucault; genealogy; nomos; Schmitt; terrorism

Carla Edgley, A genealogy of accounting materiality, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 255-271
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.06.001

Abstract
This study explores the relevance of the historical dimensions of the materiality concept and its past role. Metaphors applied to materiality provide insights into conditions and traces of power that have shaped its discursive configuration. Rather than viewing materiality as the gradual development of a technical idea over time, metaphorical discourses suggest that it has been constituted as multiple categories of knowledge, with divergent roles, as: a moral responsibility; a solution to the problem of over-auditing; a solid epistemic foundation for financial reporting; a scientific technique; a quantitative rule of thumb; a risk management concept; and a mysterious shield. The malleable nature of the concept has allowed the profession to realign and reinvent it to meet shifting priorities and challenges. Divergence in the trajectories of materiality discourses is relative to certain conditions, events, actors and financial scandals. The paper draws on the metaphor of performance, to interpret materiality as a performative activity at the crux of truth games about making visible, controlling, taming, managing and hiding translation errors in accounting inscriptions. The extent to which a genealogical analysis identifies different styles of reasoning that have shaped its meaning over time has implications for debate about its future development.

Author Keywords
Critical; Foucault; Genealogy; Materiality; Social

James Lee, Ethopoiesis: Foucault’s late ethics and the sublime body (2013) New Literary History, 44 (1), pp. 179-198.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2013.0005.

Abstract
This paper argues that Neil Hertz’s model of the sublime turn allows us to perceive the aesthetic, and specifically literary, consequences of Foucault’s late ethics reimagined as a sublime poetics. In doing so, the present analysis attempts to reanimate the concept of the sublime as a powerful ethical category reconceiving the subject in terms of the acts of writing that structure a constitutive aesthetic relationship to her own body. More generally, this account of Foucault proposes that his late ethics, and not necessarily the politics of his earlier work, holds the most interest for literary critics, since these ideas explicitly rethink ethics as a poetics, and thus foreground the frequently under recognized force of literary creation, and not simply cultural representation, in shaping subjects of power.

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2013.0005

John Roberts, Testing the limits of structuration theory in accounting research (2013) Critical Perspectives on Accounting., Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 135-141
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2012.12.002

Abstract
In 1985 I published a paper in Accounting Organizations and Society with Bob Scapens titled ‘Accounting Systems and Systems of Accountability; understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts’. The paper suggested the potential usefulness of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory for efforts to understand accounting in its organisational contexts. Rather than engage in a further review of the use of structuration theory in accounting, this paper sets out to test our original proposition as to the usefulness of Giddens ideas for accounting research. I explore three points of possible criticism in the paper. That structuration theory does not take the ‘agency’ of accounting sufficiently seriously; that Foucault and Lacan allow us to get much closer to the ways in which accounting information works back upon human subjects; and that Giddens and accounting share a lack of ethics.

Author Keywords
Accountability; Actor network theory; Modalities of interaction; Structuration theory

Jérôme Englebert
Some evidence for a psychopathological consideration on psychopathy: Part I [Quelques éléments en faveur d’une réflexion psychopathologique sur la psychopathie : Première partie]
(2013) Annales Medico-Psychologiques, 171 (3), pp. 141-146.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amp.2012.05.025

Jérôme Englebert
Some evidence for a psychopathological consideration on psychopathy: Part II [Quelques éléments en faveur d’une réflexion psychopathologique sur la psychopathie : Seconde partie]
(2013) Annales Medico-Psychologiques, 171 (3), pp. 147-153.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amp.2012.05.024

Abstract
Objectives: The objectives of this study are to offer some clinical and semiological considerations for a psychopathological conception of psychopathy. In the first part, the author provides a history of this diagnosis (see Introduction of this paper) and a description of the current trends in the international literature: the contributions of R.D. Hare and the PCL-R, D.J. Cooke and the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) and T.H. Pham for French-speaking validations (subtitle 2 of this paper). After that, the author proposes a definition of psychopathology in the sense of Minkowski and Jaspers proposals (i.e. these latter come from the principles of the continental phenomenology) (subtitle 3 of this paper). Patients and methods: This theoretical essay is improved by clinical situations. The psychopaths were interviewed in prison or in forensic centers.

The method used was a psychopathological analysis from the clinical material, as well as references to the phenomenological psychopathology (continental phenomenology) and the philosophy of J.-P. Sartre, M. Foucault and P. Ricœur. Results: This study shows that it is useful to consider a psychopathological reflection on psychopathy and this approach gives a framework for the clinical investigations. Regarding that, the author proposes a first comparison between the binswangerian conception of mania and the psychopathic functioning (subtitle 4 of this paper). By this way, we can understand why many studies show a positive correlation between the scoring in the PCL-R and the scale of the MMPI mania. The behavior is similar but the difference is about the dialectic between the ” ego” and the ” alter ego”.

The maniac has a fundamental crisis of the ” ego” , which the psychopath does not have. A second finding of our investigations concerns emotions and the dimension of the adaptive psychopathic disorder (subtitle 5 of this paper). An epistemological discussion of the concept of emotions allows us to say that the psychopath is competent in the management of emotional stimuli, which confers a psychological advantage to him. In addition, fundamental research on the management of the emotional stimuli in the psychopath seems to confirm our hypothesis of an adaptive dimension for the psychopathic disorder. The last point we discuss is about ” morality” and ” ethics” for the psychopath (these notions are from the concepts of empathy and sympathy). On the basis of Foucault’s distinction between these two concepts, it becomes possible to study these dimensions and integrate them in the practice of psychopathology. This proposal enables to introduce the concept of narrativity. This observation prompts the clinician to listen to the patient and to pay attention to how he has to tell himself.

Conclusions: Our contribution shows that it is possible to conduct a study about the psychopathology of psychopathy. Our study is not intended to be complete and irrefutable. Our goal is rather to give some evidence for a psychopathological consideration on psychopathy (as indicated by the title of this paper). Finally, we offered some thoughts on the practice of psychotherapy by integrating the adaptive dimension of this disorder which, when it is missed, can lead to a psychotherapeutic stalemate. © 2012 Elsevier Masson SAS.

Author Keywords
Adaptation; émotion; éthique; Emotion; Empathie; Empathy; Ethics; Mania; Manie; Morale; Morality; Psychopathie; Psychopathologie; Psychopathology; Psychopathy; Psychothérapie; Psychotherapy; Sympathie; Sympathy

DOI: 10.1016/j.amp.2012.05.025
DOI: 10.1016/j.amp.2012.05.024