Daniel Defoe

English writer (1660–1731). Author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Also author of An Essay upon Public Credit (1710), cited by Marx in Capital (once on the law of capitalist accumulation, once to accuse Malthus of plagiarism). On the wiki, Defoe enters via *The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II* where his Robinson Crusoe is the first of two "isolated islands" of Derrida's last seminar, read in conjoined commentary with Heidegger's 1929–30 Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. See robinson-crusoe for the figure-as-philosophical-figure.

Key Points

  • Defoe's real surname was Foe. He adopted the name Defoe mid-life (perhaps to give his name a more aristocratic Dutch sound, perhaps simply as social-rise affectation). Derrida puns on this throughout BS-II: Defoe = Daniel-the-Enemy. The pun connects Robinson Crusoe to Schmitt's foe (biblical inimicus / private enemy) vs. enemy (hostis / public enemy, properly political) distinction. On Derrida's computer, the document for the BS-II seminar is titled "hei/foe" (S2, p. 45).
  • Defoe as Dissenter and political journalist. A Presbyterian Dissenter, Defoe was imprisoned, pilloried, and bankrupted at various points for political-satirical writings. His religious-political position (anti-Stuart, Whig, low-church, fearful of Catholic coup) is the historical background for Robinson's Christian Providence conversion midway through RC. The Defoe of the Essays and the political-economic prose is the same Defoe who wrote Robinson Crusoe.
  • Defoe's economic writings. An Essay upon Public Credit (1710), The Complete English Tradesman (1726), A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) — Defoe is one of the founding figures of British political-economic prose. Marx's "Robinsonade" critique runs through Defoe's economic + fictional registers as a unified figure. The political-economic Robinson is a Defoe-as-much-as-RC figure.
  • The Farther Adventures and explicit colonialism. Defoe's sequel (Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719) contains the explicit colonial-racist ethnology that Derrida reads at length in BS-II S5: the Chinese as "a contemptible Hoord or Crowd of ignorant sordid Slaves" (cited via Pétrus Borel's French translation). Derrida calls this "the most arrogant and grandiloquently colonialist or 'British Empire' ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism" (S5, p. 198).
  • Defoe and Hobbes. Derrida flags that "Daniel Defoe, we know, was a reader of Hobbes, among others" (S1, p. 4). Robinson's foundational fear (the wild beasts, the cannibals, the savages) is "like Hobbes's man for whom fear is the primary passion." The Hobbesian register in RC is not accidental.

Selected Bibliography

  • The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) — the principal text for BS-II. Derrida uses the Modern Library edition (introduction by Virginia Woolf, 2001) for English citations; Pétrus Borel's French translation (Bibliothèque Marabout, 1977) for French citations.
  • The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) — sequel; contains the racist comparative-anthropology of the Chinese; cited at length in BS-II S5.
  • Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) — third part; not directly cited in BS-II.
  • An Essay upon Public Credit (1710) — cited by Marx in Capital.
  • Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Roxana (1724) — Defoe's other major fictions; not in BS-II but part of the Robinsonade-author corpus.

Connections

  • is the author of robinson-crusoe — the figure of insular sovereignty read by BS-II
  • is read by derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii in conjoined commentary with Heidegger's 1929–30 Grundbegriffe
  • is read by Marx in the "Robinsonade" critique of bourgeois individualism (Grundrisse, Capital)
  • is read by jean-jacques-rousseau in Emile (recommends RC as Emile's first and only book)
  • is read by James Joyce ("Daniel Defoe," 1912 Trieste lecture) and Virginia Woolf (Modern Library introduction to RC)
  • is read by gilles-deleuze (via Tournier's Vendredi, in Logic of Sense appendix "Michel Tournier and the World without Others")
  • is read by J. M. Coetzee (in Foe, 1986)
  • engages thomas-hobbes — Defoe's reader-of-Hobbes; RC's foundational fear is "like Hobbes's man"
  • engages carl-schmitt indirectly via the foe / inimicus / hostis distinction (Defoe = Daniel-the-Enemy)
  • has Arabic-Andalusian precursor Ibn Tufayl — Hayy ibn Yaqzan (c. 1185), the non-European Robinsonade

Sources

  • derrida-2002-bete-souverain-ii — principal entry; Defoe / Foe figure throughout, especially S1 (introduction of the two-text method), S2 (the foe pun), S5 (the Farther Adventures' racism).
  • robinson-crusoe — the wiki's concept page for the Robinson-figure (distinct from the author).