Histoire(s) d’archives: Imagining Thinking and Writing Practices Through Intellectual Manuscripts
The conference aims at fostering a collective reflection about methodologies and digital tools that could enable us to better perceive, beyond and through the manuscripts, the intellectual figures and their transcultural trajectories, the stories and their roots in cultural contexts, the networks and the collective practices they have been grounded in. Besides giving a different image of the history of ideas, such approach could also produce more intuitive narrations, enabling these materials to reach – thanks to their digital representation – a broader public and a non-scholar audience. The event will gather all the major actors of the network « AITIA – Archives of International Theory, an Intercultural Approach ».
Date: December 5-6, 2024, from 9:30 a.m.
Location:
5/12 : CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague
6/12: Muzeum Literatury, Pelléova 44/22, Prague
and online
Language: English
Organizers: CNRS, CEFRES, Museum of literature Prague, and the Jan Patočka Archives Prague
Program
DAY 1, December 5th, at CEFRES
Morning session: Writing thinkers and their archives
09h30 Opening remarks
10h00 Jan Frei, Jan Patočka Archives, Prague, Czech Republic, “Jan Patočka: the Archive, the Works, the Editions”
10h45 Jan Hron, Ladislav Hejdanek Archives, Prague, Czech Republic, “Ladislav Hejdanek digital archive: its possibilities and limitations”Coffee break
11h30 Luz Christopher Seiberth, Institute of Philosophy, University of Potsdam, Germany, “Hypergraph Solutions for Digital Meta-Ontologies: An Interface Architecture for Reasons and Aspects”
12h15 Silvana de Souza Ramos, São Paulo University, Brasil, “Brazilian women thinkers in the archives of the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB/USP): Gilda de Mello e Souza and Clarice Lispector” online
Lunch break
Afternoon session: Representing the archive
14h30 Emanuele Caminada, Husserl Archives KU Lewen, Belgium, “Manuscripts, Archives, and Thinking. Digital Tracking of Husserl’s Letter and Spirit”
15h15 Ulrich Lobis and Joseph Wang-Kathrein online, Research Institute Brenner Archives, Digital Science Center, University Innsbruck, Austria, “Making Use of Annotations: Tools Developed for Research in the Brenner-Archiv”
Coffee break
16h30 Kiyoko Myojo, Seijo University, Japan, Jesus College Oxford, UK, “Principles of editing and archiving: the case of the posthumous manuscripts of Franz Kafka”
17h15 Mateusz Chmurski, CEFRES (CNRS/MEAE), Prague, Czech Republic, “/Kronos/ in cerca d’autore: on facsimile and Witold Gombrowicz’s diaries”
18h00 Round table
Conference dinner
***
DAY 2, December 6th, at The Museum of Literature Prague
Morning session: Displaying litterature
09h30 Jean-Gaspard Páleníček, Museum of Literature Prague, Czech Republic, Guided tour of the Museum’s permanent exhibition
10h15 Laurence Boudart, Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Brussels, Belgium, « Les AML, carrefour international et interculturel des dialogues littéraires »
Coffee break
11h30 Honorata Sroka, CEFRES, Prague, Czech Republic, “What Does it Mean ‘Avant-garde Archive’?”
12h15 Masanori Tsukamoto, Tokyo University, Japan online, « La transformation de la nation d’implexe : de Valéry à Merleau-Ponty »
Lunch break
Afternoon session: collaborative networks, dialogues and plural authoriality
14h30 Nirmalya Chakraborty, Presidency University, Kolkata, India, “The Lost Age of Scholarship: Emergence of Navya-Nyaya Philosophy in Classical Indian Intellectual Tradition”
15h15 Venkat Srinivasan, Maya Dodd and Jayaprabha Ravindran, Co-Directors, Milli Archives Foundation, India, “How do you solve a problem like an archive? Benchmarking archives in India” online
Coffee break
16h30 Laetitia Zacchini, Laetitia Zecchini, UChicago CNRS, USA, “About the Archives of the Indian PEN and the Indian Writer-critic as Archivist-activist” online
17h15 Benedetta Zaccarello, ITEM (CNRS/ENS), Paris, France,
18h00 Closing remarks
A note on the intention of the conference
The history of national archives and that of the countries whose memory they are supposed to preserve are inextricably linked, particularly in the European context. Created to preserve and valorize a certain documentary heritage, they crystallize and historicize it, becoming an institutional tool capable of implicitly defining the cultural canons and narratives espoused by a nation.
Since the 1990s in particular, researchers have been increasingly interested in the role played by such a device in the codification of national cultures. At the same time, public interest in the behind-the-scenes work of writers and theorists alike began to revive, and a set of imaginary representations linked to the genesis of works began to spread far beyond the professional users of archives.
More recently, enormous advances in digitization have enabled thousands of collections to virtually leave the confines of the archive and be projected into the global infosphere. More and more archival images are now potentially accessible from all over the planet, reaching a much wider public than that which had access to the consultation rooms, but also much more international and therefore more varied in its practices and knowledge of the archive.
The transition from stacks to the World Wide Web offers millions of potential users the means to take greater ownership of their own cultural heritage, while at the same time testifying to the essentially transnational and intercultural nature of certain archival documents, prior to their compartmentalization in separate national institutions. For, even on a national scale, the history of culture is marked by the dynamics of exchange, translations and transfers, collective debates and networks of intellectuals.
In this respect, archival documents and handwritten traces bear witness to the linguistic, cultural and existential circumstances and contexts surrounding the work of theoretical production, making it possible to situate intellectual production in its cultural context, as well as to understand it as the result of connections and interactions between a plurality of subjects.
From such a perspective, theorists don’t appear as isolated subjects in their work of conception but rather emerge as great “passers”, mediators between different universes of reference, enabling their readers to encounter and familiarize themselves with different cultural and disciplinary traditions. For theoretical discourse is the result of exchanges, circulations and the sharing of knowledge across time and space.
Today, as digital representation tools have rapidly evolved, the intercultural and multilingual dimensions of intellectual archives are likely to be highlighted through online interfaces and interconnected web spaces. From a technical point of view, digital tools can enable us to visualize the circulation of concepts between different collections and archives, the correspondences between different thinkers, the intersections between the vocabularies of different schools of thought.However, this presupposes the development of new methods and interpretive strategies for a post-national representation of archival documents, more faithful to the original hybridity and dynamism of conceptual production and theory. Such a representation of the archives of philosophy and theory, highlighting the plurality of subjects and analyzing collections as nodes in a network of circulations, exchanges and interactions transcending disciplinary and national boundaries, is a challenge for current methodologies, whether for the study or classification of intellectual manuscripts.
This conference aims to encourage collective reflection on the methodologies and digital tools that could enable us to better perceive, beyond and through manuscripts, intellectual figures and their transcultural trajectories, histories and their anchorage in the cultural contexts, networks and collective practices in which they were embedded. In addition to providing a different picture of the history of ideas, such an approach could also produce more intuitive narratives, enabling these materials to reach a wider and even non-academic audience.The event will bring together the key players in the “AITIA – Archives of International Theory, an Intercultural Approach” network, and will bring its first phase of work to a close, while also outlining prospects for future work.
