Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure has been invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Prof. Samantha Besson.
Presentation
I introduce the concept of " trashification " to designate a social process by which certain people are treated as waste - i.e. as useless, contaminating and destined for elimination. Traces of this can be found in language, for example in the American insult " white trash ". We were confronted with it last year when Donald Trump suggested that Somalis were " trash ". We also see echoes of it in repeated calls to " clean up the streets " as a solution to the presence of homeless people in urban spaces. Beyond the metaphor, trashification rests on an articulation between ontology and phenomenology : it implies both the material devaluation of that which loses all use value, and the lived experience of disgust, neglect and abandonment. Often inscribed in conditions of extreme poverty and exclusion, it produces a circularity in which social and material degradation reinforce each other. While it may appear to be akin to objectification, trashification differs in that it does not reduce individuals to mere means, but sometimes constitutes them as objects with no use or purpose, often destined to be discarded rather than exploited. Theorizing trashification in terms of three dimensions - association, amalgamation and the logic of elimination - this conference shows that trashification is a singular and particularly serious form of degradation that pushes people to the margins and keeps them there.