Kirjahaku

As a young man, Fernando Pessoa wrote ‘be plural like the universe.’ Staying true to this, he went on to invent more than one hundred fictional alter-egos, which he called heteronyms. This biography, probing Pessoa’s experience and imagination of reality, navigates the poet’s early days in Lisbon and South Africa, reveals a philosopher-poet and pioneer of Portuguese modernism, and delves into the birth of Pessoa’s heteronymic universe. Bartholomew Ryan traverses Pessoa’s writings on evolving radical politics and his messianic dream of an empire of poets, his ventures into esoteric realms and his expertise in astrology. The book unravels Pessoa’s real and imaginary relationships, and explores his unfinished prose masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet. This is a compelling, timely exploration of Pessoa’s profound and innovative ideas, including his revolutionary concepts of identity and self-multiplicity.

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and the aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics.