Documents and monuments. Between Foucault and distant reading

The traditional opposition between documents and monuments plays an important role in Foucault’s project of an archaeology of knowledge, which entails – among other things – a certain “monumentalization” of documents. However, this opposition appears – both in its rather intricate history and in Foucault’s presentation – anything but straightforward: depending on the contexts and circumstances, monuments and documents can even exchange roles. However, it is this flexibility that allows the conceptual pair in question to prompt various reflections concerning issues that have come to attention in the course of quantitative works in the history of philosophy. In particular, I will consider the topic of corpora and their constitution, and the “documentary” or “monumental” treatment of different genres of data or texts.