Robinson Crusoé

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani keeps returning to the same observation: even alone on his island, Robinson does not live in nature. He begins by wresting from the wreck the tools, the calendar and the sextant, that is, English maritime technology1. It is therefore society that gives him the means to distance himself from it2. His first object is a table, the table of commensality3. As soon as another man appears, the relationship he sets up is one of mastery: he makes Friday his slave and names the savage, as the Anglo-Saxon master of the world45. Following Marx, who draws from him the concept of the Robinsonade, he sees in the figure of the isolated individual, who owes nothing to anyone, a projection of present-day free enterprise onto a founding past67. He also sees in it the dream of capital, a contemporary dream of solitude and the image of liberal relativism, in which each person stays on their own island. Finally, he links this figure to Rousseau, "a Robinson in spite of himself", and to the image of a libertarian, asocial Rousseau that the text refutes.

1. 1I comme île23 Dec 2014 · 2:02
2. 2#2.2 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?15 Feb 2016 · 1:38:59
3. 3Que faire ? 3/329 Jan 2016 · 1:07:32
4. 4L'Histoire est elle une matière ?9 Mar 2017 · 1:07:22
5. 5Musicosophie 1. Schubert et les maîtres chanteurs3 Dec 2020 · 51:55
6. 6Marx Plage 1/21 Feb 2016 · 23:26
7. 79 #16 Comment des sciences de l'histoire peuvent-elles être réelles?4 Mar 2021 · 50:08

Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.