ABSTRACT
Between 1973 and 1982, M. Foucault dedicated himself to editing and publishing archival texts. He published Pierre Rivière’s memorial in 1972, extracts from an English libertine’s book in 1978, and the memoirs of a young hermaphrodite in 1979. In 1982, he published a selection of documents from court archives. This article, organized in two parts, aims to understand what was at play in that archivistic-editorial endeavor. In the first part, I analyze the relations among the texts that make up that corpus and their insertion in Foucault’s overall research work of that period. Then, I address the contrasts between the project to publish a collection of archives of infamy, as it was announced in 1977, and the book actually published in 1982 with documents of the Bastille. In the second part, I put forward two hypotheses I consider to be connected to that editorial project: 1) it was a study of extra-literary conditions of the constitution of literature as knowledge; and 2) his effort to publish archival documents sought not only to “give voice” to those with no history, but also to show that a thought was embedded in their pronouncements. Foucault’s performance swam against the main currents of historiographical dogmas at the time.
Keywords:
French historiography; theory of history; archive science; library science; literary knowledge forms