Castel’s article deals with various forms of poverty which have in common a particular mode of dissociation from the social bond: disaffiliation. The author looks at the examples of the long-term unemployed, young people looking for work and on training schemes, single adults eligible for the RMI (guaranteed minimum income benefit), lone mothers, young couples crippled by the impossibility of paying bills and rent. Disaffiliation is a different condition of misery from that of poverty. The latter can be read as a state, whose forms can be listed in terms of lack (lack of earnings, of housing, of medical care, of education, lack of power or of respect). By contrast, situations of destitution constitute an effect at the place where two vectors meet: one, the axis of integration/non-integration through work; the other, an axis of integration/non-integration into a social and family network.

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