Arianna Sforzini

Arianna Sforzini studied Political Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Catholic University of Milan, at the University of Padua, and at the University of Paris-Est Créteil, where she received a PhD in Philosophy. She wrote her dissertation on the role of theatre in the philosophy of Michel Foucault (‘Scènes de la vérité. Michel Foucault et le théâtre’), and she is engaged in several editorial projects collecting previously unpublished writings of Foucault on anthropology and painting.

She has been an associated researcher at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her research interests include contemporary critical thought; interconnections between the arts, history, and philosophy; as well as political and ethical questions about bodies and genre. She is the author of Les scènes de la vérité: Michel Foucault et le théâtre (Lormont: Éditions Le bord de l’eau, 2017), Michel Foucault. Une pensée du corps (Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), and the coeditor of Un demi-siècle d’Histoire de la folie (Kimé, 2013) and Michel Foucault: éthique et vérité (1980-1984) (Vrin, 2013).

On the basis of a first exploration and inventory of the unpublished Foucault Archives recently purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the general aim of the project is to reflect on the heterogeneous and multiple temporalities of the archive and on the way in which new media have been changing our relationship with textual sources, rendering archives more open, fluid, hybrid: productively ‘errant’. The first part explores the complex layers of Foucault’s archives (with their detours, bifurcations, out-of-sync repetitions), and the ‘spiral’ timing of their contemporary reception.

The archive resources left by Foucault allow for a duplication of his own reflection on the archives of thought, discovering layers made of subsequent elaborations, vanishing lines, open possibilities. The second parts, instead, examines the nature of today’s archive, taking this undiscovered Foucauldian laboratory of thought as a starting point for a broader reflection on the post-modern digital archive, its historical emergence, its new crossing temporalities and its epistemological and political scope.