Poder e representação em histórias de vida: entre ausências e presenças

This article is a cutting of the in-progress investigation called Life Histories and Cultural Heritage: challenges of Museum of the Person, which arguments that life stories of ordinary people may be valued and affirmed as cultural heritage. The research analyzes the senses life histories have at the Museum of the Person and purposes to discuss those histories considering them as cultural heritage on the memory and identity recognition in the contemporary context. In this paper, we use Michel Foucault’s thoughts (2004) to notice the power operation as the exercise that passes through all the subjects horizontally, including the power of the narrator about its publishable history, the witness’ incontestable power. Based on the book The order of things (FOUCAULT, 2007), we intent to realize how the representation of life works on the related stories. The construction of the presence of a life absent from history is questioned. Does the narrative have the representative function of a life? Agreeing with the biographic illusion idea, we ask if the narratives are representations or creations of absent lives. The Museum of the Person is a virtual and collaborative museum that objectives to record and preserve the life histories of ordinary people, making those histories available in archives. We understand the contemporaneity presents changes on identity formations in a displacement flow on the memory political game. Then, we interrogate this place, which is able to proportionate to the subjects the construction of life narratives more or less coherent, with organized memories in a stability illusion. In this perspective, we also ask the Museum of the Person as a space that leads to the subject’s empowerment and audibility in the contemporaneity. Would the museum be a political place of ordinary subjects?