Clare O’Farrell’s Foucault News blog has just posted the abstract for a very interesting piece on Foucault’s Moi, Pierre Rivière project – Michael Sheringham, “Michel Foucault, Pierre Rivière and the Archival Imaginary“, Comparative Critical Studies 8.2–3 (2011): 235–257.

Sheringham talks about the book which includes the memoir, other documents, and some commentaries; Foucault’s use of the archive more generally; the film by René Allio; and the recent documentary Retour en Normandie. Sheringham also mentions a different film version, Je suis Pierre Rivière, directed by Christina Lipinska, which I didn’t know about (though he notes it has not been released on VHS or DVD, and rarely shown). It links to Foucault’s later work on ‘the lives of infamous men’; the Herculine Barbin memoir and the collaborative work with Arlette Farge.

Foucault’s collaborative work has been largely neglected in English scholarship, which is a shame given how important it clearly was to Foucault himself.