Summary
Of all animals a savage man is the most singular, the least known, and the most difficult to describe; and so little are we qualified to distinguish the gifts of nature from what is acquired by education, art, and imitation, that it would not be surprising to find we had totally mistaken the picture of a savage, although it were presented to us in its real colours and with its natural features.
(Buffon, Natural History, IV, 314–15)L'homme sauvage est […] de tous les animaux le plus singulier, le moins connu, et le plus difficile à décrire, mais nous distinguons si peu ce que la nature seule nous a donné de ce que l'éducation, l'art et l'exemple nous ont communiqué, ou nous le confondons si bien, qu'il ne serait pas étonnant que nous nous méconnussions totalement au portrait d'un sauvage, s'il nous était présenté avec les vraies couleurs et les seuls traits naturels qui doivent en faire le caractère.
(Buffon, Histoire naturelle, II, ‘Variétés dans l'espèce humaine’, 636–7)In volume two of The Beast and the Sovereign, the second year of these seminars, Derrida turns to Robinson Crusoe as one of his two main intertexts; the other is Heidegger's 1929–30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt– Endlichkeit– Einsamkeit, first published in 1975). Returning to questions raised via Hobbes and Rousseau in Chapter 2, this chapter will consider the question of men, such as the American ‘savages and cannibals’ in Robinson Crusoe, with a range of intertexts from Maubert de Gouvest to Jules Verne and Cixous. The cannibals in Robinson Crusoe are a community, or at least a collectivity with common purpose, albeit portrayed as ‘inhuman’. The indigenous peoples of the New World can also be represented as ‘outside the law’, men ‘in the wild’– sometimes figured as wolves, the antithesis of both the obedient dog and the lamb (a potential victim, requiring ‘protection’) in La Fontaine's Fables. The savage can also be represented as free and natural in a positive sense– an inspiration to throw off the shackles of tyranny– however, he is not a citizen.
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- Derrida and Other AnimalsThe Boundaries of the Human, pp. 182 - 248Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015