Abstract

Robert Castel (1933-2013) worked during his entire life within two main domains: psychiatry, or more generally on the «champs psy» as it is called in France, and from the 1990s until his death on the transformation of contemporary societies in relation to work policies and social protections. In this essay, which serves as an introduction to the Italian translation of Le roman de la désaffiliation. À propos de Tristan et Iseut, I aim to develop a twofold reflection axis. On the one hand, I intend to explore the semantics of the notion of «disaffiliation» by trying to show its conceptual origin, to unveil its genealogy. On the other hand, I would like to discuss the possible causes why Castel’s work, so thoughtful and sophisticated, has had such an incredibly limited echo and circulation – compared to that of his coeval colleagues (Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, ecc.) – that we have to speak of a «classic that never was». At the crossroads of these two trajectories, I will show that this missed appointment depends precisely on the type of sociology practised by the French sociologist, which I define here as «a minor social science». Nevertheless, despite of this scarce reception, the article aims to shed light on the importance of this kind of sociology, claiming the need for its reprise within our most current reflections.