by Burghard Baltrusch
in Lusorama 81-82, 2010, pp. 39-65, ISSN 0931-9484
This study aims to show the influence of anarchism in the way Fernando Pessoa tried to improve his theory and... more
This study aims to show the influence of anarchism in the way Fernando Pessoa tried to improve his theory and aesthetics of heteronymy. For an analysis and contextualization of The Anarchist Banker it is indispensable to take into account the parallels with, for example, Álvaro de Campos’ Apontamentos para uma estética não-aristotélica (Notes on a non-Aristotelian aesthetics), or the radical epistemology of Alberto Caeiro. The banker’s discourse, built from the ideas of Max Stirner, highlights one of the great pradoxical axioms of Pessoa’s philosophy: Fiction is the only individual reality (and vice versa). In this way, Pessoa alludes to the ideological struggle between the modernist critique of reason and the illustrated utopias, following the history of anarchism, and even foresees the future developments of its ideas. As utopia is the horizon of anarchism, so does the self emerge as an individual construction and exaggeration of reality. The timeliness of this assumption is its parallelism with a (positive) deconstructive postmodernism of metanarratives and a (negative) critique of globalizing and destabilizing neoliberalism. Thus, heteronomy as holistic and aesthetic discourse, implies the abolition of what we assume being 'natural' attitudes (and "social fictions," including those of anarchism itself) in relation to an unreachable reality in terms of objectivity. As anarchy represents a kind of unity of multiplicity, so is heteronomy, and O Banqueiro Anarquista is but an exemplification of this condition. The reception of anarchy in Pessoa's work enacts the paradox as the only truth, as a reconstruction within the eternal deconstruction and translation of meaning. Therefore, the dialectics of O Banqueiro Anarquista is constructed, consciously and intentionally, as a satirical sophism that raises the question of the universal conflict between reality and fiction (or utopia).
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