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Abstract
Historians and philosophers alike are now aware of the need for what Arlette Farge calls a “taste for archives”, that is, the pleasure of working with archives, but also the sensory experience they evoke — their smell, their texture, their colour. Yet recourse to archives has not always been obvious, nor inherent to the practice of philosophy and history, which have often limited themselves to earlier philosophical writings from which the philosopher thinks, meditates, criticizes, and elaborates his theory.
We propose to think afresh about the question of “collective memory” as elaborated by Maurice Halbwachs, in order to conceive what we shall call a “social memory”, or what Michel Foucault referred to as a “popular memory”. What does it mean to construct a social memory, far from the grand narrative of History, that is, a memory aimed at saving a certain popular history from oblivion? Can we conceive of memory not as a collection of sites and objects of memory, but as a living and active force upon which society can ground itself and achieve emancipation? Is writing a social memory a way of escaping collective amnesia? In short, is remembering the social not also writing the history of those forgotten by history?
We will examine the practical and theoretical writings of Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge, Jacques Rancière, and Nicole Loraux, all of whom engage with the question of restoring a social, popular, and emancipatory memory. Drawing also on the anthropology of memory, we will explore the issues of collective amnesia, oblivion, and erasure in relation to the work of the historian-archivist, who seeks to rescue and restore what “monumental history” (as Nietzsche criticized it) has often left by the wayside, or even erased.