ABSTRACT
It no doubt began as an exercise in wistful speculation, an entertaining thought experiment, what they call in French une hypothèse d'école, and it at some point became a popular parlor game and a good final round question for all the dating games of the world: “If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could take just two books with you, what two books would you take?” 1 During the academic year 2002–03, in the course of what would turn out to be his final seminar, Jacques Derrida essentially poses himself this question and then answers it in a rather surprising way. His two books, the two books with which he would seclude or isolate himself for the entirety of his final seminar, would be Heidegger's 1929–30 seminar on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1983/1995) and Daniel Defoe's (1894) Robinson Crusoe. Derrida thus did not choose the Bible (which was in effect Robinson Crusoe's unintended choice), or Rousseau's Confessions or Proust's Recherche (Derrida's first language was, after all, French) or Finnegans Wake (which Joyce said it would take a lifetime to understand), but Robinson Crusoe. And he did not choose the collected works of Aristotle (which Heidegger said every philosopher should study for fifteen years before doing anything else — but who has time for that? — and so a shipwreck would be a welcome opportunity), or Hegel's Phenomenology, or even Heidegger's own Being and Time (a twentieth-century classic by any reckoning), but a much lesser known lecture course given by Heidegger just two years after Being and Time. 2
