Contents Disappointed Utopia Miscellany

On the archival sources

I am not a professional historian. However, I did consult a number of archival sources in the course of working on this project.

1. The Paris 8 University Library holds a substantial archive, including a collection of course catalogs that are very helpful for tracing the history of teaching and of the staff directory.

2. An interesting collection of photographs and political art is available (as of 2022) in Paris 8’s online collections at https://octaviana.fr/.

3. At the curiously named archive La Contemporaine (formerly the BDIC, Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine) on the campus of Paris Nanterre, there is an an extremely useful collection by Assia Melamed that contains many documents and historical interviews pertinent to philosophy at Vincennes in the 1970s.

4. The sociologist Charles Soulié has a substantial personal archive of interviews, photographs and documents about the Vincennes period, which I was able to consult.

5. I learned too late that the Philosophy Department maintained its own departmental archives, which I heard were badly damaged in a flood in the basement. I never consulted these documents, but if they still exist, they would surely be interesting.

For the more well-known figures involved in this site, the public record is already very large, and I took advantage of what I could, particularly the biographies, autobiographies and collected texts. I have made no pretense of exhaustiveness.

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