Another long day revising Foucault: The Birth of Power. Further work restructuring the introduction and some rewriting, and a bit more tweaking in the conclusion. Some of this is undoing the work done over the past couple of days and trying again. Moments when you wonder why something is where it is, move it, delete it or rework it, and then a few pages later realise exactly why it was like that. So, retrace the steps and revise again. It’s a couple of months since I submitted the manuscript, and while I can remember the content well, the detailed architectonic is – at least for me – harder to keep in mind when I’m not working on it so intensely. I’ve now printed a complete clean version of the manuscript, for a read through on paper. I only do this at a very late stage – this is only the third time in total – and I find I always see things on a page that I don’t on a screen. It’s also good to get a break from the computer, though I did manage a decent bike ride today too.

I’ll read it tomorrow and see where I am then. I’m also revising my book chapter on Farge and Foucault’s Le désordre des familles, following some comments from Nancy Luxon, the editor of Archives of Infamy (the companion volume to the forthcoming English translation).