Nancy Luxon (Ed.) Archives of Infamy. Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, University of Minnesota Press, 2019
What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.
Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.
Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender.
Contributors: André Béjin, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Lynne Huffer, Emory University; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Michelle Perrot; Michel Rey (1953–1993); Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Policing and Criminality in Disorderly Families
Nancy Luxon
PART I Archival Materials: Audiences and Contexts
1 Lives of Infamous Men (1977)
Michel Foucault
2 “All about the Lettres de Cachet” (1983)
André Béjin, Roger Chartier, Arlette Farge,
Michel Foucault, and Michelle Perrot
3 Review of Disorderly Families (1983)
Jean-Philippe Guinle
4 Denunciation, a Slow Poison (1983)
Michel Heurteaux
PART II Letters and Events: From Composition to Contestation
5 The Order of Discourse (1970)
Michel Foucault
6 The Public Sphere and Public Opinion (1990)
Roger Chartier
7 The Return of the Event (1972)
Pierre Nora
8 Thinking and Defining the Event in History (2002)
Arlette Farge
9 Home, Street, City: Farge, Foucault, and
the Spaces of the Lettres de Cachet
Stuart Elden
10 Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle,
1700–1750: The Police Archives (1985)
Michel Rey
11 Sovereign Address (2012)
Elizabeth Wingrove
12 Gender, Agency, and the Circulations of Power
Nancy Luxon
13 Foucault’s Rhythmic Hand
Lynne Huffer
Foucault News 