The Panther Moderns

"Foucault examines the question of life from three points of view. The
first approach, tied to the valorization of the archive, consists in detecting
the traces of ‘the taking of power over the ordinariness of life’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]: 245) in the fragmentary accounts of anonymous men kept in
the records of the General Hospital and the Bastille in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Indeed, prior to the flattening of these ‘cases’ in the vocabulary
and descriptive apparatus of administrative procedures from the 19th
century, these fragments of anonymous existence struck Foucault by their
mixture of violence and poetry, of extreme dramatization and savagery, that
he recovered in the project ‘Parallel Lives’, a series that includes the journal
of Herculine Barbin. This interest in the ‘lives of infamous men’ (Foucault,
1994b [1977]) is motivated by the attempt to understand the interweaving
of the narration of minor or insignificant lives and the strategies of power,
and to express why ‘the things that constitute the ordinary, the unimportant
detail, obscurity, inglorious days, life in common, can and must be spoken
– preferably written’ (1994b [1977]: 248)."

(Judith Revel. “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions”. Theory Culture Society: Special issue on Foucault, Vol 26, n. 6 (2009).
p. 52)