Becoming a Master of an Island Again: On the Desire to be Bodiless

Abstract

Reading Robinson Crusoe 300 years after its first publication can help us understand two major fantasies of our current moment: the desire to be in complete possession of oneself and thus invulnerable to the endless reconfigurations of the world one merely happens to be part of; and the desire to return to the times when society was ordained as an aggregate of self-contained, self-actualizing individuals. Both fantasies have been invested in the creation of the two paradigmatic figures of our time – the neoliberal homo economicus and the white masculine master of his property and affairs. Both desires have, additionally, rested upon numerous erasures not only of vulnerability and inter/dependence in general, but also and significantly of the body. I argue, however, that the desire to be bodiless goes hand in hand with the desire to place and possess bodies, as material or symbolic property, which are for various reasons denied the capacity to be self-actualizing, indivisible, and independent. Robinson Crusoe works as a fictional figure with which a self-possessed master identifies with and desires to return to.