Archives and unpublished documents

A detailed inventory of the Henry and Stella Corbin Fund has been put online on the Calames database. This research tool was compiled by Daniel Proulx, researcher in charge of the classification of the Henry and Stella Corbin archives, under the direction of Jacques Berchon, General Curator - Director of the Common Service of Documentation, Libraries and Archives of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), based on the inventory compiled by Maria Soster in 2003. It was carried out with the financial support of the Agence bibliographique de l'enseignement supérieur. This research instrument was encoded in the Calames tool from September to December 2015 and from September to December 2016.

Henry and Stella Corbin Archives

Scientific interests

 

The Henry Corbin archives are the testimony of more than 50 years of continuous intellectual activity at the heart of the development of religious science, philosophy (phenomenology and hermeneutics) and the establishment of Iranology. The correspondence maintained with Arkoun, Baruzi, Benveniste, Benz, Brun, Caillois, Cirillo, Durand, Eliade, Faivre, Fouchécour, Foussard, Friedrich, Fröbe-Kapteyn, Gorceix, Groethuysen, Heidegger, Ivanow, Jambet, Jaspers, Jung, Jolivet, Jourdan, Kojève, Koyré, Lévi-Strauss, Lory, Massignon, Miller, Paulhan, Puech, Queneau, Ritter, de Rougemont, Ruspoli, Scholem, Shayegan, Stauffer, Tucci, Vajda, Vieillard-Baron, Wahl, to name a few of the famous names in the collection, has an undeniable historical and heritage value. Because Henry Corbin's work cabinet bequeathed by Stella Corbin is complete and contains his unpublished lectures, his manuscripts and typescripts as well as his correspondence, it is possible to reconstruct the origin of his ideas and to understand and document his choices.

Structure of the archives

 

The Henry and Stella Corbin collection is made up of the documents of his working cabinet, currently divided into 346 boxes. It consists of his complete correspondence, about 6200 letters, about 450 newspaper and magazine clippings, unpublished texts and books, some of which were published posthumously (Hamann, philosopher of Lutheranism, with an introduction by Jean Brun, Paris, Berg international, coll. "L'Île verte", 1985, 152 p.; L'Iran et la philosophie, Paris, Fayard, coll. "Espace intérieur" no. 39, 1990, 268 p.; Autour de Jung, le bouddhisme et la sophia, Entrelacs, Paris, 2014, unpublished translations, including an almost complete translation of Être et temps de Martin Heidegger dating from 1943 (Sylvain Camilleri and Daniel Proulx, "Martin Heidegger et Henry Corbin : lettres et documents (1930-1941)," in Bulletin heideggérien, vol.4, 2014, p. 4-63), drafts of most of his books and lectures, original and corrected typescripts, reprints with annotations, scattered notes, several of the lectures given by Henry Corbin when he was a professor at the EPHE. In the oldest documents, we find the notes of several of the courses he took when he was a student at the EPHE and at the Sorbonne, notably the courses of Bréhier, Gilson, Massignon, workbooks in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Aramaic and most of his personal agendas from 1928 to 1978. The collection is completed by his personal library, which is kept by the EPHE library of religious sciences. It consists of 1562 books, several of which contain glosses and annotations.

Consult the archives

 

The inventory of the archive collection is available on CALAME (www.calames.abes.fr/pub/#details?id=FileId-2016).

Consultation of the archives is subject to the authorization of the legal representatives and is done by appointment. The request must be addressed to the Grand équipement documentaire du Campus Condorcet by using this email: [email protected].

Grand équipement documentaire du Campus Condorcet
20 avenue George Sand
93210 Saint-Denis La Plaine
Téléphone : 33 (0)1 55 93 93 76
[email protected]
Site web du Campus Condorcet

Letters exchange by Corbin and Heidegger

It was published in March 2014 in volume 4 of the Bulletin heideggérien by Sylvain Camilleri and Daniel Proulx.

In the chronology established by Jambet we find the following mention in 1930: Henry Corbin notes on August 6: "Lu Heidegger". Here is the digitization of the page where this note comes from.

AHC - Agenda HC 6 août 1930

Interview with the Shah : 8th of March, 1947 from five thirty to seven thirty pm.

Extracts from one of Stella Corbin's Letters : Teheran the 22 September 1945

Meetings with André Malraux

Final Memories of Henry Corbin, November 1978

Memories from the Childhood of Henry Corbin

 

Memories from the Childhood of Stella Corbin

Lettre inédite d’Henry Corbin à David Leroy Miller : Sur le nouveau polythéisme (Nous remercions Stéphane Toussaint et Tilo Schabert)

CHEETHAM, T., The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World - An Introduction to the Spiritual Vision of Henry Corbin, Henry Corbin, Islam and the Imagination, octobre 2010, Oxford.