Robinson Crusoe (figure)

Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) — read by Derrida (BS-II) as the first of two "isolated islands" of the seminar (the second being Heidegger's 1929–30 Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik). The Robinson-figure stands at the intersection of insular solitude, prosthetic sovereignty, pre-political ipse-formation, fear-as-Hobbesian-primary-passion, conversion / Christian-providence, unheimlich self-haunting (the footprint), auto-affective machine (the wheel, the prayer, the parrot Poll), and colonial mastery (Friday). The whole "Robinsonade" tradition — Rousseau's Emile recommending RC as Emile's first book; Marx's critique of bourgeois individualism; Joyce's "true symbol of the British conquest"; Virginia Woolf's "earthenware pot" reading; Deleuze on Tournier's Vendredi; Ibn Tufayl's pre-Defoe Arabic Hayy ibn Yaqzan — converges here. This page is the wiki's home for the Robinson-as-philosophical-figure; the author has his own entity page at daniel-defoe.

Key Points

  • Robinson Crusoe is the paradigmatic insular sovereign. Robinson on his "Island of Despair" declares himself "Prince and Lord of the whole Island"; he reigns over goats, parrot, dog, cat, then Friday and the Spaniard. The sovereignty is pre-political: it operates before the contract-with-others (no other humans, then one subject), and before the nation-state. Rousseau makes this explicit in Social Contract I.2: "Adam was the sovereign of the world, like Robinson of his island, so long as he was its only inhabitant." (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S1, pp. 19-22.)
  • The voting booth (isoloir) is an island. The Robinsonian pre-political sovereignty is also the citizen-sovereignty of democratic theory: each voter alone in his cubicle "decides sovereignly" his political choice. Marx's "Robinsonade" critique (the Grundrisse, Capital) and Deleuze's reading of Tournier's Vendredi connect Robinson to bourgeois individualism. The voting booth as island makes the political-economic Robinson concrete. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S1, pp. 21–28.)
  • Robinson's foundational fear is being swallowed up alive or buried alive. The fear of dying living, of being devoured into the deep belly of earth or sea or animal (cannibal, wild beast), is for Derrida "the fundamental, foundational fear, the basic fear from which all other fears are derived" (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S3, p. 77). Fits with Hobbes's primary-passion-of-fear; binds to the inhumation/cremation autoimmune analysis of S5–S6 and to Blanchot's "buried alive" as the symbol of fiction itself.
  • The wheel as Robinsonian prosthesis. Robinson cannot make a wheelbarrow but invents the grindstone-wheel — a self-turning machine: "The wheel turns on its own. The machine is what works on its own by turning on itself" (S3, p. 78). Derrida treats the wheel as metaphora of ipseity: auto-mobile, auto-affective, automatic. The wheel is the second-degree power (one step beyond the wheelbarrow's mere tool-extension) — the autonomy of the machine. Robinson claims he "never saw any such thing in England" (RC, 77) — but Derrida shows grindstones were common; the wheel is a re-invention presented as first-time.
  • Prayer, the parrot Poll, and the autobiography are structurally homologous to the wheel. All four are "machines that work alone," auto-affective devices that turn on their own axis. Robinson's "first authentic prayer" (RC, 85) is in fact a repetition: he learned prayer in childhood, forgot, "reinvents" on the island. Poll the parrot calls "Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe!" — Robinson's own voice returned to him from outside, "the auto-appellation come from the world." The book Robinson Crusoe itself is the autobiographical machine. All four instantiate the same auto-affective / auto-immune structure. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S3, pp. 75–88; see also marionette for the BS-I-to-BS-II thread.)
  • The footprint as unheimlich self-revenance. When Robinson discovers the bare footprint (RC, 145–146) he is paralyzed by the possibility that the print may be his own: "Is it me? Is it my track? Is it my path? Is it the specter of my print, the print of my specter? Am I coming back?" Derrida treats this as paradigmatic: ipseity-on-an-island is constituted by undecidability of one's own trace, return-of-self-as-other. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S2, p. 48.)
  • Robinson Crusoe is a "world without women." "The other woman is always death" (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S2, p. 55). The widow advises against return; "My Wife dying . . ." (RC, 281) appears only as a dependent clause. The two women in the novel appear by preterition and as figures of death. Sovereignty is structurally bound to the absence of sexual difference, of the heterosexual desire that would limit it.
  • Robinson Crusoe is also "the most arrogant and grandiloquently colonialist or 'British Empire' ethnocentrism." Derrida reads Robinson's racist comparative-anthropology of the Chinese in the Farther Adventures — "a contemptible Hoord or Crowd of ignorant sordid Slaves" — and follows Joyce, Marx, Deleuze in naming RC as the paradigmatic British-colonial fiction. The cannibal scale of alterity ("the more other, the less other"; cannibal-as-most-other-because-closest) is RC's structural law. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S5, pp. 198-209.)
  • Robinson Crusoe was "buried alive" — and "swallow'd up alive." Derrida's S5 provocation: the noematic content of Robinson's phantasm "really happened" in some sense — to the book, to the name, to the narrative. RC itself is living-dead, a trace, survivance: "it begins with survival." The book is the paradigm case of survivance. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S5, pp. 190–195.)
  • The Robinsonade is non-European and pre-Defoe. Ibn Tufayl's 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqzan — two islands; gazelle-suckled child; encounter with Asal; failed conversion of Salaman's Koranic islanders — is an Andalusian-Arabic philosophical romance that radically destabilizes the European canonization of Robinson Crusoe as paradigmatic island-fiction. Derrida flags this at S10 pp. 276–77, in 1.5 pages, after 280 pages of European-canonical reading: more gesture than analysis, but enough to de-provincialize the figure.

Details

The four conjoined Robinsons (Derrida's typology)

BS-II develops the Robinson-figure across four distinct registers:

  1. Robinson the political-economic figure (Marx, Joyce, Deleuze): RC as anticipation of bourgeois individualism, British colonialism, capitalist accumulation. (Marx in Grundrisse and Capital cites Defoe's Essay upon Public Credit — once on the law of capitalist accumulation, once to accuse Malthus of plagiarism.) "The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe" (Joyce, 1912 Trieste lecture; cited S1, p. 16). Friday as "symbol of the subject races."
  2. Robinson the philosophical-pedagogical figure (Rousseau, Kant): Emile recommends RC as Emile's first and only book; Robinson as the model of self-sufficient education. Kant's "What Is Orientation in Thinking?" (1786) develops a Robinsonian Wegweiser (signpost) of "purely rational belief." Kant's "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History" (1786) names Robinson explicitly: "Robinsons and voyages to the South Seas so seductive" (cited S10, p. 275).
  3. Robinson the philosophizing-Heidegger figure (Derrida's coinage): "Robinson Heidegger ... isolates himself from the whole tradition, from all traditions, and asks himself, out of nowhere, the question of the path" (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S2, p. 33). Heidegger's Sein und Zeit gesture of beginning from what is "closest" (Dasein, Zuhandensein) is a "hyperbolic Robinsonade." Heidegger and Defoe share path-anxiety, Umweg-fear, the going-in-circles, the closest-as-already-distant.
  4. Robinson the autobiographical-confession figure (Augustine, Rousseau, Derrida himself): RC as a "confession book" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S3, p. 80). RC's "first prayer" / "first true prayer" / "first journal" / "first true conversion" are all re-inventions presented as first-times. The autobiographical machine.

The two-text method

BS-II's announced method (S1, p. 13) is to "isolate like islands two texts": Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Heidegger's Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929-30). The two are read in conjoined commentary, "the one in the margin of the other." On Derrida's computer, the document for the seminar is titled "hei/foe" (S2, p. 45) — Heidegger plus Foe (Defoe's real surname, the enemy-figure connecting to Schmitt's inimicus / hostis).

The method is not philological-historical (the two texts have no influence-relation) but structural-deconstructive: both are Robinsonades; both are obsessed with the closest path, the orientation problem, the fear of going-in-circles. Heidegger philosophizes Robinson-style; Robinson Crusoe is a proto-Heideggerian Dasein.

The Defoe / Foe pun and Schmitt's enemy

Daniel Defoe's real surname was Foe. Derrida puns on this throughout BS-II: Defoe = Daniel-the-Enemy. The pun connects RC to Schmitt's "foe" / inimicus (private enemy) vs. hostis (public enemy, properly political) distinction. Robinson's foundational fear of the wild beast / the cannibal / the savage is structurally Schmittian — the political begins where the enemy-figure begins. But on Robinson's island the enemy reduces to the bare footprint — the trace of an other-without-determination. This is the political at its limit: not a determined enemy, just the unheimlich possibility of another. (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S2, pp. 45-48.)

Poll the parrot and the logos apophantikos

Poll the parrot — the only animal Robinson trains to speech — is the figure of mechanical hetero-appellation: Robinson's own voice returned to him from outside. "I was wak'd ... by a Voice calling me by my Name several times, Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe" (RC, 131). Poll auto-affects Robinson via Robinson's own training; the parrot is the auto-affective machine writ small.

In the seminar's climactic S10, Derrida figures the Iraq War's belligerent leaders (Bush, Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld, Aznar, Blair, Chirac, Sharon, Arafat, Putin, John Paul II) as so many parrots whom a "super-Security-Council" tribunal compels him (in nightmare) to grant access to Aristotle's logos apophantikos. Poll is "the first victim of the humanist arrogance that thought it could give itself the right to speech, and therefore the right to the world as such" (S10, p. 260). The parrot bridges the seminar's animal-question to the contemporary political-theological question of who has the right to declare war.

Robinson and the inhumation/cremation register

Robinson's "buried alive" fear connects to the seminar's S5–S6 analysis of the modern Western choice between inhumation and cremation. Robinson digs his cave, then abandons it for fear of being buried alive; the trade-off is security vs. liberty (secure underground tomb vs. open hut). The figure prefigures Derrida's autoimmune double-bind of the corpse: every choice (burial / cremation) betrays what it tries to honour. See survivance for the wiki home of this register.

The Robinson-Hayy duality

Ibn Tufayl's 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqzan (c. 1185) — the gazelle-suckled child on an uninhabited island; ascending metaphysical knowledge; encounter with Asal the holy-man-from-neighboring-island; failed mission to convert the Koranic islanders of Salaman — is not a Defoe-precursor in the linear philological sense (no influence-chain established) but a structurally analogous Robinsonade belonging to a different (non-European, non-Christian, non-individualist) philosophical tradition. Derrida invokes Ibn Tufayl at S10 pp. 276–77 to de-provincialize the Western canonization of RC. The wider point: the Robinsonade (the figure of solitary insular self-formation) is a global philosophical type, not a uniquely European one.

What the Concept Does

  • Names the paradigm scene of pre-political insular sovereignty. The Robinson-figure operates before the nation-state, before the social contract, before the encounter with the other-as-political-enemy. This pre-political sovereignty is structurally important: it shows that what looks like political-philosophical sovereignty (Bodin, Hobbes, Schmitt) presupposes a Robinsonian prior sovereignty over the island.
  • Locates the colonial dimension of bourgeois individualism. Via Marx's Robinsonade-critique, Joyce's British-conquest-symbol, Deleuze's perversion-without-other, and Derrida's reading of the Farther Adventures' anti-Chinese racism, RC is the paradigmatic European-colonial fiction. The wiki's political-theological register intersects here with the colonial register.
  • Connects the literary register to the Heideggerian-philosophical register. Heidegger's Sein und Zeit opening — start from what is closest, take Dasein, fear the Umweg — is a Robinsonade. The conjoined reading is the seminar's methodological wager and one of BS-II's most original moves.
  • Specifies the auto-affective machinery (wheel, prayer, parrot, autobiography) as structurally homologous — all "machines that work alone." This deepens the BS-I treatment of the marionette as undecidable threshold between mechanism / animal / human / sovereign.
  • Names the foundational fear: swallow'd up alive / bury'd alive. The fear of dying-living. This binds Robinson to the seminar's S5–S6 inhumation/cremation analysis and to survivance as the trace that "begins with survival."
  • Identifies the Robinson is not bored feature. Heidegger's 1929–30 seminar makes boredom the Grundstimmung of philosophy (stimmung; Lang(e)weile; Sichlangweilen) — but Robinson is precisely not bored. He is busy. The asymmetry between Heideggerian Dasein (capable of profound boredom) and Robinson's practical-busy solitude is analytically loaded.

What It Rejects

  • The reading of Robinson Crusoe as a simple adventure-novel or solitude-fantasy. Derrida follows Joyce, Marx, Deleuze in treating RC as a politically-philosophically dense text whose colonial, gender-exclusionary, and pre-political dimensions are constitutive.
  • The European canonization of RC as paradigmatic island-fiction. The S10 detour through Ibn Tufayl decentres the canonization; Hayy ibn Yaqzan shows the Robinsonade has a pre-Defoe non-European life.
  • The naturalization of the wheel as Robinson's invention. Robinson's claim he "never saw any such thing in England" is shown false; the wheel is a re-invention. By extension: all of Robinson's "first times" (first prayer, first conversion, first religion, first technology) are repetitions presented as first-times. Origin is structurally repetition.
  • The reading of the footprint as merely a narrative trick. Derrida treats it as paradigmatic of ipseity's unheimlich self-relation: every step on a closed circuit is potentially the trace of one's own past or future.

Stakes

  • For sovereignty on the wiki: BS-II's Robinson is the figure through which BS-I's sovereignty-as-ipseity-autoposition becomes sovereignty-as-insular-solitude. The voting booth (isoloir) as island makes this democratic-political. The wiki's sovereignty page acquires a Robinsonian sub-register.
  • For the wiki's colonial-political register: BS-II's Robinson is paradigmatically European-colonial. The Farther Adventures racism, the Friday-mastery, the cannibal-as-fellow-most-other — these set up Derrida's most explicit articulation of the seminar's colonial-psychoanalytic register (the Freudian Mischlinge metaphor as "key for psychoanalytic politics," S6 pp. 226–227).
  • For the Heidegger register: the Robinson-figure is the analytical wedge by which BS-II re-reads Sein und Zeit's opening gesture (start from the closest) as a Robinsonade. This re-reading is one of the seminar's most original moves; the wiki's Heidegger entity page now must record the Robinson Heidegger coinage.
  • For Ibn Tufayl's entry into the wiki: the S10 Ibn Tufayl section opens an entirely new (non-European, Arabic-Andalusian) corner of the wiki. The Robinson-Hayy pairing is structurally a "false friend with substance" — the two figures resemble but the philosophical traditions diverge fundamentally.

Problem-Space

How does pre-political insular sovereignty (the Robinson-figure) condition political-theological sovereignty? The problem-space recurs across (i) Rousseau's Adam-as-Robinson (Social Contract I.2); (ii) Marx's Robinsonade as anticipation of bourgeois individualism; (iii) Defoe's RC as British colonial paradigm; (iv) Tournier's Vendredi as perversion-without-other; (v) Heidegger's Sein und Zeit opening as hyperbolic Robinsonade; (vi) Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan as non-European Robinsonade; (vii) the citizen-voter-in-isoloir as Robinsonian democratic-individual. Distinct vocabularies (insularity, autarky, perversion, Selbst, autodidact-knowledge, voting-booth-solitude) converge on one recurring problem: the production of pre-political sovereignty as the condition of political sovereignty. The problem-space exceeds RC alone and qualifies as a candidate for an insularity or pre-political-sovereignty problem-space-tagged page in a future ingest pass.

Motif Weight & Corpus Recurrence

Robinson Crusoe as a corpus-level motif is currently single-source-attested on this wiki (derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii introduces it). Within BS-II it is STRUCTURAL — saturates all 10 sessions as one of the two principal reading-targets. At the wider corpus level it could become HUB-weight if future ingests (e.g., Rousseau's Emile; Marx's Grundrisse; Joyce's Daniel Defoe lecture; Tournier's Vendredi; an Ibn Tufayl ingest) corroborate.

For now: this concept page IS the wiki home for the Robinson-figure; cross-references run primarily through derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii and daniel-defoe.

Connections

  • is developed by derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii — read as one of the two "isolated islands" of the seminar; figure of insular sovereignty, auto-affective machinery, unheimlich self-haunting
  • is the work of daniel-defoe — the author (1660–1731)
  • enacts sovereignty — pre-political insular sovereignty as the structural condition of political-theological sovereignty
  • enacts walten (by being read against Heidegger) — Heidegger's path-anxiety is a "hyperbolic Robinsonade"
  • requires survivance — the book itself is the paradigm of survivance ("buried alive," "swallow'd up alive," yet still here)
  • shares mechanism with marionette — wheel, prayer, parrot, autobiography are auto-affective machines homologous to the marionette's undecidable threshold
  • contrasts with Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan (S10) — the non-European Arabic-Andalusian Robinsonade; structurally analogous but philosophically divergent
  • engages karl-marx's Robinsonade critique (Grundrisse, Capital)
  • engages jean-jacques-rousseau — Emile recommends RC; Social Contract I.2 makes Adam-and-Robinson the figure of pre-political sovereignty
  • engages gilles-deleuze — Logic of Sense appendix on Tournier's Vendredi; "the only Robinsonade is perversion itself"
  • engages carl-schmitt indirectly via the Defoe / Foe / inimicus / hostis pun
  • engages thomas-hobbes — Robinson's foundational fear is "like Hobbes's man"
  • engages immanuel-kant — "What Is Orientation in Thinking?"; "Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History" (S10)
  • engages sigmund-freud — Mischlinge metaphor as colonial-psychoanalytic key (S6); Freud's "splendid isolation" self-comparison to Robinson (S6 p. 230)
  • engages Joyce's 1912 Trieste lecture and Virginia Woolf's RC introduction
  • is referenced via parrot Poll in the derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii S10 Iraq-War nightmare
  • is the "second island" of Heidegger's 1929–30 seminar (as Derrida reads them together via the "hei/foe" document)

Open Questions

  • Is Robinson Crusoe structurally a Christian-Providential novel or a secular-capitalist novel? Defoe was Dissenter; Robinson's "first true prayer" and conversion midway through the novel suggest the Providential reading; Marx's economic-anthropology reading suggests the secular one. Derrida holds both readings simultaneously without resolving.
  • What is the relation between the Robinson-Hayy pair? Both are gazelle-suckled (Hayy) or solitary (Robinson) figures of insular self-formation. The structural analogy is genuine; the philosophical divergence (Christian Providence vs. Sufi anhupotheton) is also genuine. Whether this is a "cross-tradition cousin" or a "false friend" is unresolved; see ibn-tufayl.
  • Does Tournier's Vendredi (and Deleuze's reading) override Defoe? Tournier rewrites RC with Friday as the master and Robinson as the perverted self-without-other. Whether Vendredi is a continuation or a refutation of RC is unclear in Derrida's account.
  • Robinson as a figure for Derrida himself? The seminar is shot through with auto-citation (S2 on yesterday-as-noun and "I am from yesterday"; S7's "I posthume as I breathe"). How biographical is the Robinson-identification? Open.

Sources

  • derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii — the seminar. RC saturates all 10 sessions as one of two principal texts; full extraction at .extraction-derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii.md (especially args #6–#14, #18–#22).
  • daniel-defoe — the author (1660–1731). Wikilink for the entity register.
  • Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) — introduction by Virginia Woolf (New York: Modern Library, 2001). Derrida's English edition.
  • Defoe, Daniel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Cited via Pétrus Borel's French translation (Bibliothèque Marabout reprint, 1977).