Abstract

My paper begins with a reflection on the Foucauldian category of “infamy,” which I would like to consider both as a political category and as a literary category. “La vie des hommes infâmes” (1977) is a particularly noteworthy text in that there is both a clear distinction between archive and literature and an analysis of a recomposition of the relationship between discourse, truth, and power that draws what Foucault calls “the line of literature’s tendency since the seventeenth century, since it commenced to be literature in the modern sense of the word.” On the one hand, Foucault defends the idea that, to allow the archive to deliver its strictly political dimension, it is necessary to clean it up, to build it out of literature and in a strict relation to reality. On the other hand, he claims that literature has become capable at some point of having the ambition to tell the real, to “tell of the ultimate, and the most minute, degrees of the real”: of being, perhaps more than any other form of language, the “discourse of infamy.” This paper aims to explore this tension, from the (methodological/archaeological) exclusion of literature to the genealogy of a literature of reality and infamy.