A Table in the Wilderness: Desire, Subjectivity, and Animal Husbandry in <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) offers a surprising account of how the human subject is imagined and constructed. I read Defoe’s novel as a deep—often opaque and contradictory—meditation on how human subjectivity is produced through the inter relations between human and non-human animals. The logic and practices of animal husbandry are central to the way Defoe frames the questions of “wildness,” “desire,” and “mastery.” The novel’s account of Crusoe’s taming of the island’s goats is not merely a semi-comic or picturesque touch. Rather, the process of taming a wild goat mirrors the way that Crusoe subjugates Friday, as well as the way that Crusoe masters and shapes his own mind and body. Crusoe’s prac tices of self-mastery resonate with Michel Foucault’s final thoughts on the history of sexuality, in which he theorizes the “practices of the self” that bring the “subject of desire” into being historically.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".