I recently came across the Michel Foucault Archives website, created and hosted by IMEC (the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives or l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine).

IMEC “manages archives and studies linked to different actors of the XXth Century writing and book world : publishers, writers, intellectuals, artists, book traders, journal editors, journalists, critics, literary agents, translators, printers, graphic designers” and “opens private papers to research within the frameworks of a public service with controlled access.” For a list of their holdings, click here.

Offline, IMEC is located in l’Abbaye d’Ardenne, a medieval abbey in Caen, in the region of Normandy, France.

Back to the Foucault Archives:

The site provides a chronology of his career and publications, a list of the archival holdings of IMEC, a small collection of photographs, reviews and links to other related websites. What I found most interesting was the online archives – they’ve made Foucault’s prepatory notes available for Madness & Civilization as well as The Impossible Prison.

Only about half of the Michel Foucault Archives website has been translated into English. If you click on the French version of the site, you will also find links to two additional online sources: (1) the manuscript, corrections, and newspaper article (Italian: Corriere della sera) of «Une poudrière appelée Islam»; and (2) the printed, audio, and manuscript versions of a course offered by Foucault at the Collège de France entitled «L’Herméneutique du Sujet.»