Professor Michael Sheringham, from All Souls College, University of Oxford, will be giving an open lecture at Kent’s Paris centre on Friday 28 March, entitled ‘Archival Lives: Legacies of “La vie des homes infâmes” in Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge and the Collectif Maurice Florence’.
Foucault’s 1977 essay ‘La vie des hommes infâmes’ is both an evocation of the power and beauty of archival traces of lost lives, and a compelling argument about a historical shift that made the everyday present in discourse, with repercussions for literary writing, especially the novel.
In this talk, Professor Sheringham will look at some of the fortunes of this essay, initially in a collaborative work by Foucault and the historian Arlette Farge, Le Désordre des familles (1982), a compilation of extracts from the eighteenth-century Archives de la Bastille. He will then assess Farge’s role as a standard-bearer for a Foucaldian view of the archive in a range of works, notably Le Goût de l’archive (1989), before focusing in detail on her remarkable photo-textual opus, La Chambre à deux lits et le cordonnier de Tel-Aviv (2000). He will end with some remarks on a recent resurfacing of Foucault’s essay, also combining texts and visual material: Archives de l’infamie (2009) compiled by the Collectif Maurice Florence. At stake throughout will be the status of lives briefly glimpsed in the archive, however remote, and how they can be seen to illuminate our own everyday world, and different ways of capturing it in writing and photography.
Professor Sheringham is an alumnus of the University of Kent, and also a former member of staff in the Department of French.
For more information about the lecture, please see the SECL events calendar here: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events
Anyone wishing to attend the lecture should email paris@kent.ac.uk by Wednesday 26 March.