Trashification

Written at the crossroads of philosophy and social science, the book presents a typology of prevalent inferiorizing modes, ranging from infantilization and objectification to demonization and animalization. It offers precise definitions of these “debasement technologies” (Chamayou 2008) through historical and contemporary case studies, highlighting their specificities, social functions, and the policies they are often associated with. My varied case studies range from the demonization of immigrants and welfare recipients, the infantilization of older community members, and the animalization of Tutsis during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. The book’s most significant philosophical contribution is the development of a new relational egalitarian framework. Its key social scientific contribution is its precise typology, which can be mobilized to study and measure social inequalities. I will collaborate with social scientists at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequalities to create a new relational measure of inequalities.

At the Collège de France, I will present a new chapter of my draft book on what I call “trashification” —a form of objectification in which individuals are perceived as trash and treated accordingly. Since trash holds negative value and must be discarded or hidden, trashification represents a particularly extreme type of objectification and should be recognized as such. Drawing on contemporary examples and utilizing existing theories of objectification as a foundation, I develop an account of the uniqueness of trashification and illuminate its specific wrongness. My starting point is the example of the widely used “white trash” slur and the trashification of poor whites in the American South and beyond. The dominant narrative is discussed by author Cedar Monroe, who grew up in a poor community in Washington State: “Poor Whites, always pushed westward as the vanguard of land acquisition by large corporate interests, finally went as far West as possible. There, many of us were thrown away, just like the trash heaps that surrounded the tent cities spreading up and down the coastline. Trash people living among trash: that is the dominant narrative about our lives.” (Monroe 2024).

One specificity of trashification is that it does not always involve instrumentalization or toolification – the use of individuals as instruments or tools for one’s ends. While many forms of objectification are deeply linked to exploitation, trashification often results in neglect, non-assistance, and abandonment instead. Like waste, the trashified are seen as unusable and must disappear. Objectification is wrongful because it constitutes a form of relating in which we treat individuals as mere means to an end (Nussbaum 1995). Trashification, by contrast, is often wrongful because people are regarded as untouchable, unrelatable, and discardable. The trashified are perceived as worthless, and entire communities are abandoned to die. They die young from medical neglect, preventable diseases and infections, police brutality, suicide, or overdose. Their deaths are normalized, expected, and overlooked. From this example, I extend my study to the trashification of unhoused individuals throughout American cities and the case of the untouchable Dalits in India.

The notion of trashification is essential for understanding a range of severe contemporary cases of marginalization and for making progress on relational egalitarianism because, not unlike segregation, it results in a severance of ties that are a prerequisite for relational equality.