The book delves into Sophie Calle's immersive exploration of the abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay between 1978 and 1981, where she inhabited room 501 and documented its decay through photography. Over five years, she collected various artifacts that revealed stories of the past. Decades later, she revisits the site during lockdown, armed with a flashlight, to uncover its history and the remnants of its former life. This work reconstructs her archive, intertwining personal memories with the broader narrative of a forgotten space, evoking a sense of nostalgia and connection to history.
The history of Indo-European studies resembles a family saga, featuring founding figures and misguided descendants, and stands alongside major scientific discoveries like penicillin and gravity. It is one of the few social science achievements recognized by the "hard" sciences, as the identification of similarities among Indo-European languages laid the groundwork for general linguistics in the 19th century. This field uniquely developed and applied widely acknowledged mathematical models, drawing envy from other social sciences. In the mid-19th century, German grammarian Schleicher referenced Darwin when constructing his family tree of Indo-European languages, inspiring biologists to explore Indo-European migrations within the human genome.
The saga began with pioneers at the end of the 18th century who recognized language relationships by comparing Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Sir William Jones, a prominent figure, inspired generations of German linguists. The first generation, led by Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask, established the principles of comparative grammar and expanded the corpus to include various Indo-European families. The second generation, represented by August Schleicher, created a family tree based on natural science models and wrote a fable in a reconstructed primordial language. The Leipzig "Neo-Grammarians" formed the final generation, developing rigorous phonetic laws to explain language evolution and reconst
