A castaway is flung against the shore. He arrives battered by the sea, clings to a rock, runs as the wave retreats, and, upon setting foot on solid ground, gives thanks for having survived. He does not know whether he is on an island or a continent, whether there are men or beasts. He spends the first night in a tree, out of fear. The island presents itself as a threat. Only then can the work begin: he salvages provisions from the ship, marks out a space, organises, enumerates, writes and names. In this way, the island becomes the stage on which survival is transformed into order and isolation into a principle of governance. The island is never alone, and there is always a possible alterity — feared, imagined, awaited or present. It is precisely for this reason that it must be presumed deserted.
Since the eighteenth century, the island has become the privileged setting for what Marx called Robinsonades: narratives that isolate an individual in order to explain the forms of social organisation as though they were natural. In his doctoral thesis, entitled Insularidad y Fuga: Problemas de localización en la Tierra del Fuego, Carlos Masotta argues that this operation does not express the island in itself, but rather the continent that asserts itself through it. The island is a placing of the world in parentheses, one that allows a given order to be naturalised. It is, therefore, a scene of naturalisation: separation, shipwreck, survival and foundation — a gesture by which the island becomes a myth of origin. This bracketing also suspends the common dimension of relations, that is, the relational condition that makes shared life possible. The common is not community, but the material fabric of relations — human and more-than-human — that depends upon no founding act whatsoever. In isolating and founding, the Robinsonade institutes an order whilst simultaneously rendering invisible the web of interdependencies that precedes it.
Gilles Deleuze shows that the island is a figure of the imagination. He distinguishes between continental islands — detached, derived — and oceanic islands — emergent, originary — but what is decisive is the movement that both activate: separation and re-foundation. To dream of an island is to dream of withdrawing from the world, or of recreating it from a second origin. The island is "deserted" because the imagination must erase what already exists in order for the beginning to be absolute. In this sense, the desert is a mythological condition, for even when the island is inhabited, the fiction of isolation continues to operate. The island is thus the place where the fantasy of beginning without a past is rehearsed.
Michael Taussig shifts the scene towards its political reverse. If the island can be imagined as treasure, adventure or fresh start, it is also the prototype of the exception. The prison island concentrates this logic. In a territory surrounded by water, the law acquires a particular density and confinement is doubled. In his reading of Gorgona, Taussig shows how the island condenses mythology and state violence. The name, the legend, and the maximum-security penitentiary converge in an enclave where geographical separation reinforces political separation, such that the island magnifies punishment. He therefore asserts that for every treasure island there is a prison island. Both share the same structure: that of a space cut away from the world where power is exercised without mediation, and where sovereignty, once dramatised, becomes visible in its most naked form.
In his thesis, Masotta calls this operation insulamiento — a modern technique of spatial governance that employs the island as a metaphor for the limit. To insularise is to produce separation as an organising principle. Wherever "the island" is declared, a specific mode of ordering the world is activated. By reducing the complexity of relations to a closed unit, it causes space to appear as homogeneous, self-sufficient and governable. The island, thus conceived, refers back to the operation that institutes it as exception. Accordingly, rather than describing the world, the insular produces it. Against this logic of enclosure, the archipelago introduces a different way of thinking about relation. Whereas insulamiento reduces space to a governable unit, the archipelago insists on connection without a centre and on coexistence without fusion.
Today the scale has shifted. It is no longer the castaway who imagines the island as a world apart; it is the world itself that reveals itself as an island. Suspended in the void, finite and vulnerable, the Earth offers no continent to which one might flee. The fiction of founding upon what has been declared desert becomes untenable when the entire planet appears as an exhausted and intervened-upon space. Thus, the separation that in modernity functioned as a guarantee of sovereignty has been transformed into a material limit, for there is no exterior in which to rehearse a new origin. To think the world as an island is to acknowledge that every declaration of emptiness was an operation, and that every act of foundation had consequences. There is no longer any desert in which to found without affecting what is held in common.
Ana Cecilia Gerrard