Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens

Description

Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault's Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life 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 responsibl

Nancy Luxon is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault and editor of Disorderly Families (Minnesota, 2016). Thomas Scott-Railton is a freelance French-English translator. He translated Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault (Minnesota, 2016).

"Listening to the voices rising from the archives, grasping the distant echoes of confrontations with power, exhuming the tenuous grain of tiny existences-this is what Michel Foucault chose to do. Does the philosopher's gesture conflict with the historical understanding of archival material? This look back at an exciting debate asks: is it possible to build together a concern for anonymous lives, a literary passion for documentary fragments, and the desire to make a history of the discourses and practices of power?" -Judith Revel, Universite Paris Nanterre "The book should be of interest to Foucault scholars, political scientists, historians of eighteenth century France, as well as general readers."-Foucault Studies