ANARQUIA E HETERONÍMIA EM FERNANDO PESSOA – O BANQUEIRO ANARQUISTA REVISITADO

Abstract

This study argues the influence of anarchism in Fernando Pessoa’s theory and aesthetics of heteronomy. Analysis and contextualization of O Banqueiro Anarquista [The Anarchist Banker] needs 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 paradoxical axioms of Pessoa’s philosophy: fiction becomes the only individual reality (and vice versa). Following the history of anarchy, Pessoa hints at the ideological struggle between the modernist critique of reason and the utopias of Enlightenment. As utopia is the ultimate horizon of anarchism, Pessoa makes the self emerge as an individual construction and the final exaggeration of reality. The relevance of this assumption lies in its parallelism with postmodernism positively deconstructing master narratives and with a critique of negatively globalizing and destabilizing neoliberalism. Thus, heteronomy as a holistic and aesthetic discourse implies the abolition of what we assume as ‘natural’ attitudes (and “social fictions”, including those of anarchism itself) in relation to an unreachable objective reality. As anarchy represents a kind of unity of multiplicity, so does 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).