Collectif Maurice Florence revisits Foucault's 'infamous lives' in digital age

The Collectif Maurice Florence has published 'Archives de l'infâmie', a book that critically engages with Michel Foucault's unfinished project 'La vie des hommes infâmes'. Foucault's preface, which opens with 'Ce n'est pas un livre d'histoire', describes an anthology of singular lives reduced to a few words, forming strange poems. The collective offers a critical reading of Foucault's text, considering new technical and practical modalities of archiving and self-description in the era of digitization and the Internet. They then pursue these effects in the constitution of a set of archives. The study highlights a paradox in Foucault's conception of infamy: society strives to let no one escape, yet condemns itself to recording what constantly eludes it. This paradox opens a reflection on power that makes people act and speak, as well as on new discursive regimes, or 'fables'. The reader is invited to understand the present in its relation to power by looking at the past and measuring the distances that separate us from it. The book is published by Éditions les Prairies ordinaires and was reviewed by Christophe Kihm in art press n°361 (November 2009).