Daniel Defoe’s exemplary status in cultural histories of the novel rests upon the premise that his fiction anticipates the rise of bourgeois civil society—a shift in social relations precipitated by the disarticulation of labor and exchange from sovereign control. This essay complicates the progressive (and often emancipatory) narrative of the civil society hermeneutic model by attending to the figure of “abandoned life” in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year, arguing that a more robust understanding of Defoe’s political imagination vis-à-vis sovereign power takes shape if we attend to the ways that a “Life not worth saving” structures his vision of the social. I situate the novel form as central to this vision. My readings establish a direct connection between the unique mode of referentiality that novels invented (an orientation toward what Henry Fielding called “not men but manners; not an individual but a species”) and the unique mode of governance that modern nation-states required (an orientation toward what Michel Foucault called “not man-as-body but…man-as-species”) to argue that Defoe’s novelistic imagination was biopolitical from the very start.

中文翻译：

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丹尼尔笛福与被遗弃的生活

丹尼尔·笛福在小说文化史中的典范地位建立在这样一个前提之上：他的小说预见了资产阶级公民社会的兴起——一种由劳动和交换脱离主权控制而引发的社会关系转变。这篇文章通过关注鲁滨逊漂流记和瘟疫年杂志中“被遗弃的生活”的形象，使公民社会解释学模型的进步（通常是解放）叙事复杂化，认为对笛福的政治想象有更深刻的理解。如果我们关注“不值得拯救的生命”构建他的社会愿景的方式，那么主权权力就会形成。我将小说形式作为这一愿景的核心。