This pioneering volume explores the extraordinary Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and his relationship to philosophy. On the one hand, this book reveals Pessoa’s serious knowledge of philosophy and playful philosophical explorations and how he has the gift of synthesizing, appropriating, and subverting complex ideas into his art; and, on the other hand, the chapters shed new light on central aspects and problems of philosophy through the prism of Pessoa’s diverse writings. The volume includes sixteen new essays from an international group of scholars, analyzing Pessoa’s multifaceted poetic work alongside philosophical themes and movements, from conceptions of time, ancient and modern aesthetics, philosophy of language, transcendentalism, immanence, and nihilism; to Islamic philosophy, Indian philosophy, Daoism, neo-paganism, and the philosophy of the self. The breadth of his work provides a springboard for new thinking on the aesthetic and the spiritual, the logic of value and capitalist modernity, and ecological thought and postmodernism.
The volume also includes the most complete English translation of Pessoa's text (written by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos) called "Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro."
Author(s): Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, Antonio Cardiello
Series: Global Aesthetic Research
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 416
City: Lanham
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Permissions
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher
1. Sailing out with Pessoa and Philosophy
2. A Plurality of Authors, Personalities, Ideas, Movements, Styles and Genres
3. Poets Reading Philosophy; Philosophers Reading Poetry
4. The Layout of the Book
References
Exordium1
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References
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro1
Part I: Essays on Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy
Chapter 1: Fernando Pessoa’s Vision of Neopaganism as Life’s Supreme Art1
References
Chapter 2: Fernando Pessoa, Daoism and the Gap: Insubstantiality, Emptiness, Vagueness and Indetermination
1. Insubstantiality, Emptiness, Vagueness and Indetermination in Daoism
2. The Vague, the In Between and the Gap in Fernando Pessoa
References
Chapter 3: Pessoa’s Imaginary India
1. An Imagined India
2. An ‘Indian Ideal’
3. Pessoa and the Upaniṣads
4. Pessoa’s Indian Contemporaries
References
Chapter 4: Fernando Pessoa and Islamic Philosophy
I. Islamic Philosophy in Pessoa’s fictional prose
II. Pessoa, FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyām and Sufism
Closing Remarks
References
Part II: Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics
Chapter 5: Nihilism and on Being Nothing in ‘The Tobacco Shop’*
I
II
III
IV
VI
References
Chapter 6: Pessoa and Time
1. Fernando Pessoa and the hope in the past
2. Alberto Caeiro and the annulment of time in nature
3. Ricardo Reis and the serene passage of death
4. Álvaro de Campos and the futurist gathering of the times
References
Chapter 7: Pessoa and American Transcendentalism
1. Pessoa’s Library
2. The Transcendentalist Roots of Pessoa’s ‘Sensationist’ Poetics
3. How to Widen the Boundaries of Individuality: The Heteronymic Practice
4. Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Bernardo Soares’s Becoming-Landscape1
Reference
Part III: Philosophies of Selfhood
Chapter 9: Voicing Vacillation, Logos and Masks of the Self: Mirroring Kierkegaard and Pessoa
1. Voicing Philosophies and Poetics of Vacillation
2. Voicing Logos of the Self
3. Voicing Masks of the Self
References
Chapter 10: The Difference between Othering Oneself and Becoming What One Is1
Preliminary Considerations
A few curiosities about the ‘I’
The decision to dispense with the concept of the subject
Subject or lair of literary creatures?
A Return to Nietzschean Indiscipline
Being outside oneself: heteronymism and inspiration
The Mask and Faking
The Most Thankless of Tasks
Our Diverse and Successive Someone. NONE IS ME, BUT I AM THEIR ENSEMBLE
Finale
References
Chapter 11: A Hermeneutics of Disquiet: Approaching Pessoa through Foucault
1. The Middle Region of the Subject
2. Phantasms Exist
3. Know and Take Care of Thyself
4. Soul(ill)ness
5. A Dreaming Conversion
6. Arts of Dreaming
7. An Ascesis of Disquiet
References
Part IV: Contemporary Problems and Perspectives
Chapter 12: Pessoa’s ‘The Anarchist Banker’ and the Logic of Value
The Value of Logic
The Logic of Value
References
Chapter 13: For Your Eyes Only: The Logic of Seeing in Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry
1. White on White Poetry
2. Complexity, Negation and Referential Vertigo
3. A Unique Tautology in the Structure of Caeiro’s Poems
4. Caeiro at work: the rule of production of the poetic discourse
5. With eyes completely open: the visibility of things
References
Chapter 14: Where Does Fernando Pessoa Dwell? : The Economy and Ecology of the Heteronyms
1. Unsettlement
2. Homelessness
3. Artificiality
4. Economology
References
Chapter 15: The ‘Pessoa Event’: Notes on Philosophy and Poetry
1.
2.
3.
4.
References
Essay on Free Will
Fouillée and Schopenhauer
Bibliography
[Consider the extraordinary dualism] by Fernando Pessoa
(Transcription)
*
Does knowledge exist?
Gaultier
Comment on Jules de Gaultier
(Translation)
Comment on Jules de Gaultier
(Transcription)
All fake dogmas and all false certainties
Büchner, Haeckel and Maurras
[Certainties have been transmuted]
(Translation)
[Transmudaram-se as certezas]
(Transcription)
Rationalism is science bounded by agnosticism
Robertson (and other rationalists)
[Rationalism holds]
(Transcription)
References
Critical Bibliography
1. From Pessoa’s Bookshelf
2. Books and Selections of Writings by Pessoa published in English
3. A Selection of Books and Writings by Pessoa Published in Portuguese
4. A Selection of Secondary Works on Pessoa and Philosophy
Index
About the Authors
