Reterritorializing Colonial Bodies: Novelistic Origins of Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe might be termed an originary novel in the sense in which it reveals, at the same time as it conceals, the historical process of its own making in a singularly primordial way. Composed by the self and composing the self, its narrative mode of double genitive implies a split consciousness compelled to take its own process of unfolding into account. The novelistic consciousness (or Crusoe the novelist) functions here to lay siege to, and capture, the dislocating expanse between the colonist’s rambling wanderlust and his narrative desire for composition/composure. In the process, Crusoe’s island, the no-man’s-land on whose alien/alienating shore Crusoe the rambler finds himself stranded, is paradoxically transformed into the realm of bare, naked bodies in which the distinction between violence and law, exception and rule, fact and fiction, etc., is wholly effaced. The resulting narrative topography discloses the event of Ur-sprung or originary rupture at the threshold of modernity in which the phantasmatic opacity of reterritorialized colonial bodies is subtended by, and suspended over, sovereign gaze as the disembodied apparatus of technology.