Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0009-0761-3903
Abstract
This essay attempts to elucidate the uniqueness of the concept of desert island in Gilles Deleuze’s thinking, juxtaposing it with Carl Schmitt’s idea of struggle between the land and the sea. Especially, Deleuze’s notion of “desert island” is to be reread and revisited in terms of archipelagic literality of islands themselves. Deleuze’s concept of “desert island” is different from other conceptualizations of island in two critical aspects. Firstly, it does not metaphorize something other than island itself; its desertedness has nothing to do with utopian or apocalyptic representation of what the continent lacks. Secondly, it does not feed on the familiar “postcolonial” demystification of shipwrecked globality incarnated in Robinson Crusoe; desert island is neither terra nullius nor tabula rasa. For Deleuze, desert island is a space for re-creation or heterotopos, not an origin or an alternative utopia which global capitalist stratification could not incorporate. What is valorized in “desert island” is its non-human elan, its consciousness of itself as event. The non-human desertedness of island consists of uncanny intensities, or perversions, with which desert islands engage themselves with continental and maritime forces, while drawing other islands and human inhabitants towards themselves in order to form a rhizomatic sea of islands.
Recommended Citation
Kang, Woosung
(2025)
"Heterotopos of Desert Island,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
46, Article 8.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2157
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss46/8
