How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe
Christopher F. Loar, University of California
Volume 19, no. 1&2, Fall 2006
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ABSTRACT
“As for the gun it self, he would not so much as touch it for several days after; but would speak to it, and talk to it, as if it had answer’d him, when he was by himself; which, as I afterwards learn’d of him, was to desire it not to kill him.” Friday may understand Robinson Crusoe’s gun better than Crusoe does. In the scene noted in the epigraph above, although Friday is innocent of the gun’s inner workings, he sees something that Crusoe has missed: Crusoe’s power to dispense violence, rather than cultural authority or friendship, has started Friday down the path towards civility and virtue. Conversely, Crusoe’s disavowal of his own violence reverberates throughout the novel, from his escape from the Barbary captivity to his trip across the Pyrenees at the novel’s end. But his disavowal is particularly pronounced in the novel’s precolonial settings: Africa and Crusoe’s Caribbean island. In the scenes of colonial encounter and technological power, Daniel Defoe uses Crusoe and his gun to explore the operations of violence in politics, as well as the ways in which the ideology of British liberty veils that violence. Crusoe’s weapons serve as a figure for the violence and warfare that lurk at the foundational moment of sovereignty as well as of the ideology of liberty that makes sovereignty’s violence tolerable.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Colonialism” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
by EDWARD J. KOZACZKA (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme
by INGVILD HAGEN KJØRHOLT (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
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