Defoe

Summary

Dominique Pagani speaks of Defoe only in connection with Robinson Crusoe, which he reads as a lucid novel and calls a masterpiece12. What he draws from it first is the first hundred pages, in which Robinson recovers from the shipwreck the technology of his time, especially English maritime technology34. He concludes that Robinson is not man in nature: he has the inheritance of the productive forces at his disposal, and what he lives on belongs to culture, not nature5. He then stresses the encounter with Friday, which sets up a master-slave relationship from the very start6. He comes back to this point in a session on Hegel, in one on revolutionary thought, and in a session on negritude devoted to Adotevi. He also places the novel in the England of the industrial revolution, at the moment when the man of nature returns as nostalgia7. Later he cites it as an example of the place of nature in English literature.

1. 1What is to be done? 3/329 Jan 2016 · 1:07:32
2. 2Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2017)8 Jun 2017 · 17:17
3. 3#1.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?14 Sept 2015 · 1:04:53
4. 4#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought21 Nov 2018 · 46:09
5. 5#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?15 Feb 2016 · 1:38:18
6. 6Hegel on the Beach 4/52 Feb 2016 · 44:47
7. 7Marx on the Beach 1/21 Feb 2016 · 24:52

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.