Abstract
Rather than adopting the recluse's gaze or surrendering to Arsenio Frugoni's fictional temptation, the aim here is to suggest that normative literature can document, by contrast or negative imprint, this narrative logic of the experience of places understood as " plural surface of events " and thus prior to their reduction to the uniqueness of the Albertian storia of a space. This hypothesis is tested on the basis of three classic bodies of communal and post-communal history. First, urban statutes and regulations, whose narratives of space document the social experience of ways of inhabiting and qualifying the city. Secondly, tax returns, which force taxpayers to expose, justify and tell their stories. Finally, the listing of those who govern and those who are excluded from government. In all three cases, it's a question of declaring oneself - i.e. stating, pronouncing, denouncing. At a time when we are indulging, without apparent pretence, in the virtual transparency of the exhibition society, how are we to think of that ancient moment when, to put it with Walter Benjamin, " the lecture of experience fell " ? It is on the analysis of his magnificent text " Le conteur " (1936) that the following lectures would have focused, had the teaching not been interrupted.
