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Tracés, n°37/2019

Tracés, n°37/2019

Les irrécupérables

Edited by Émilie Guitard, Igor Krtolica, Baptiste Monsaingeon, Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust

Tracés



Beyond reclaim

Derogatively connoted most of the time, the word "irrecoverable" is not an usual category in social sciences and humanities. In everyday speech, one call “irrecoverable” people or things that cannot be reclaimed, and that need to be removed because of their resistance to every recycling or rehabilitation initiative. Considering the current injunction to reintegrate, rehabilitate, and recycle everything, this issue makes the hypothesis that this injunction also tends to deny the fact that industrial capitalist societies massively and constantly produce people and things beyond reclaim. Yet, the purpose is not necessarily to level out the processes of discarding objects and of excluding people, but to jointly tackle environmental and social issues resulting from this hypothesis. By what apparatuses are produced irrecoverable human and non-human beings? Who is socially entitled to pronounce such verdicts of irrecoverability? How are managed these beings considered irrecoverable? What types of resistance are they able to produce ?