Émile Benveniste (27 May 1902, Aleppo, Syria – 3 October 1976, Paris) was a French Jewish structural linguist, semiotician, an apprentice of Antoine Meillet and his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to agree with it at first, being a convinced follower of the sociological stance of his teacher.

He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his expansion of the linguistic paradigm established by Saussure. Initially studying under Antoine Meillet, a former student of Saussure, at the Sorbonne, he began teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and was elected to the Collège de France a decade later in 1937 as professor of linguistics. By this time he had already begun his investigation into the status of names within the history of Indo-European linguistic forms. He held his seat at the Collège de France until 1969 when he retired due to deteriorating health. However, he served as the first President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies from 1969 to 1972.

At the start of his career, Benveniste's highly specialised and technical work limited his influence to a small circle of scholars. The publication of his monumental text, Problèmes de linguistique générale or Problems in General Linguistics, would elevate his position to much wider recognition. The two volumes of this work appeared in 1966 and 1974 respectively. The book exhibits not only scientific rigour but also a lucid style accessible to the layman, consisting of various writings culled from a period of more than twenty-five years. In Chapter 5, Animal Communication and Human Language, Benveniste refutes behaviourist linguistic interpretations by demonstrating that human speech, unlike the so-called languages of bees and other animals, cannot be merely reduced to a stimulus-response system.

The I-you polarity is another important development explored in the text. The third person acts under the conditions of possibility of this polarity between the first and second persons. Narration and description illustrate this.

I signifies "the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I." This instance is unique by definition and has validity only in its uniqueness ... I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone.

You, on the other hand, is defined in this way:

by introducing the situation of "address," we obtain a symmetrical definition for you as "the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance of you." These definitions refer to I and you as a category of language and are related to their position in language. -- from Problems in General Linguistics

A pivotal concept in Benveniste's work is the distinction between the énoncé and the énonciation, which grew out of his study on pronouns. The énoncé is the statement independent of context, whereas the énonciation is the act of stating as tied to context. In essence, this distinction moved Benveniste to see language itself as a "discursive instance" - fundamentally as discourse. This discourse is, in turn, the actual utilisation, the very enactment, of language.

One of the founders of Structuralism, Roland Barthes, attended Benveniste's seminars at Ecole Pratique. Pierre Bourdieu was instrumental in publishing Benveniste's other masterpiece, Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-Européennes in his series Le Sens Commun at radical publisher Editions de Minuit (1969). The title is deceiving: It is not a "vocabulary" but a comprehensive and comparative analysis of key social behaviors and institutions across Germanic, Romanesque, Greek and Roman, Old Iranian and Indian cultures, using the words ("vocables") that denote them as points of entry. It hovers over philology, anthropology, phenomenology and sociology. A number of contemporary French philosophers often refer to Benveniste's Vocabulaire and are inspired by his methodology and distinction between signification and designation (Barbara Cassin, Nicole Loraux, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, François Jullien, Marc Crépon). Jacques Derrida's famous work on "hospitality, the Other, the enemy" is an explicit "gloss" on Benveniste's ground-breaking study of host/hostility/hospitality in the Vocabulary ( Chapter 7) (Jacques Derrida, On Hospitality, 2000).

Publications translated to English[link]

• 1969: Indo-European language and society, translated by Elizabeth Palmer. London: Faber and Faber 1973. ISBN 0-87024-250-4.
• 1966-1974: Problems in general linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, 2 vols. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami, P 1971. ISBN 0-87024-132-X.

Selected works[link]

• Hittite et indo-européen : études comparatives
• Indo-European language and society
• Les infinitifs avestiques
• Langue, discours, société
• Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen
• The Persian religion, according to the chief Greek texts
• Problèmes de linguistique générale
• Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes
• Inscriptions de bactriane extraits

Giorgio Agamben (born 22 April 1942)^[1] is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer.^[2]

Agamben teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy.^[3] He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, Evanston, and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. He also starred in the art-film-tract "Get Rid Of Yourself", contributing some of his perspectives to an analysis of the Black Bloc and anarchist participation in the G8 ministerial in Genoa, Italy which occurred July 2001.^[4]

Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006.^[5]

Biography[link]

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote an unpublished thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968.^[6] In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Stanzas (1977).

Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" (in The End of the Poem) and "Parody" (in Profanations). He has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he collaborated, for a short while, as counsellor of the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and others.

His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Agamben edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and viewed Benjamin's thought as "the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger."^[7] In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agamben's own later work were Benjamin's manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History.^[8] Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in Agamben's study State of Exception (2003). His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, whom he calls "a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years".^[9]

Agamben's political thought was originally founded on his readings of Aristotle's Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and treatise On the Soul, as well as the exegetical traditions concerning these texts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In his later work, Agamben intervenes in the theoretical debates following the publication of Nancy's essay La communauté désoeuvrée (1983),^[10] and Maurice Blanchot's response, La communauté inavouable (1983). These texts analyzed the notion of community at a time when the European Community was under debate. Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community (1990). At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who does not react, and "prefers not" to write.

In the Homo Sacer series, Agamben responds to Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. Since 1995 he has been best known for this ongoing project, the volumes of which have been published out of order, and which currently includes^[11] :

• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995),
• State of Exception. Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003),
• The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Homo Sacer II, 2 (2007),
• The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II, 3 (2008),
• Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (1998).

In the projected final volume of the series, Agamben intends to address "the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles." "What I call a form-of-life," he explains, "is a life which can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something like bare life. [...] [H]ere too the concept of privacy comes in to play."^[12]

Work[link]

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (October 2009)

In The Coming Community (1993), Giorgio Agamben writes:

If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible... This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality...

— ^[13]

This reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of an homo sacer, reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between 'bare life' (la vita nuda, Gk.ζωή: zoê) and 'a particular mode of life' or 'qualified life.' In Part III, section 7 of Homo Sacer, “The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern”, he evokes the concentration camps of World War II. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The conditions in the camps were "conditio inhumana," and the incarcerated somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the exception laws of Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct.

“In United States criminal law, people accused of committing crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves verbally, but can be compelled to incriminate themselves physically.”^{[citation needed]} In the process of creating a state of exception these effects can compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his voice and represent themselves- the individual has can not only be deprived of their citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. “Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life.”^[14] Within the state of exception, the distinction between bios(citizen) and zoe(homo sacer) is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9–11.

Agamben mentions that basic universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside of the law, he is according to Agamben, reduced to 'bare life' in the eyes of the judicial powers.^{[citation needed]} Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has deprived the individual of power, and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.”^[15] Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one’s humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison also operate outside of the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding not allowing them to die. During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February 2006, The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC [2], voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breach of the government’s power and was against the rights of the prisoners.

[edit] The Coming Community (1993)

In The Coming Community, published in Italian in 1990 and English translation by longtime admirer Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. The beauty and brevity of the text is augmented by the book layout, filled with design, white space and random dots. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of “whatever singularity” as that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”. It is important to note his understanding of “whatever” not as being indifference but based on the Latin translation of “being such that it always matters”

He starts off by describing “The Lovable”

Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.

— ^[16]

Following the same trend, Agamben employs, among others, the following to describe the “watershed of whatever”:

• Example – Particular and Universal
• Limbo – Blessed and Damned
• Homonym – concept and idea
• Halo – Potentiality and Actuality
• Face – common and proper, genus and individual
• Threshold – inside and outside
• Coming Community – State & Non-state (humanity)^[17]

Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.

Unlike other continental philosophers he does not reject the age-old dichotomies of subject – object, potentiality – actuality etc. outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable.

Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo

— ^[17]

The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors,^[18] he nonetheless shows a concrete example of whatever singularity acting politically:

Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear

— ^[19]

[edit] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995)

In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure^[20] figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (set-apart man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody, while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.^{[citation needed]}

Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a Homo sacer, although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer was therefore excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (Basileus) – a king, emperor, or president – who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).

Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated. But if Schmitt's aim is to include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on the contrary demonstrates that all life cannot be subsumed by law. As in Homo sacer, the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.^{[clarification needed]}

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" (zoe, as opposed to bios: qualified life) is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity – from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz.^{[citation needed]} Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (zen), but existing with regard to the good life (eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord with its 'bios') by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception) of what is to remain outside of the political body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition ('zoe')^{[citation needed]}. According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.^[21]

Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading "State of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture at European Graduate School describing the eclipse that politics has undergone.^[22] Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State.^[22]

[edit] State of Exception (2005)

In this book, Agamben traces the concept of 'state of exception' (Ausnahmezustand) used by Carl Schmitt to Roman justitium and auctoritas. This leads him to a response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to proclaim the exception .

Giorgio Agamben’s text State of Exception investigates the increase of power structures governments employ in supposed times of crisis. Within these times of crisis, Agamben refers to increased extension of power as states of exception, where questions of citizenship and individual rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government.

The state of exception invests one person or government with the power and voice of authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the past. “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" (Agamben, pg 40). Agamben refers a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler’s rule. “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system" (Agamben, pg 2).

The political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government – or one form or branch of government – as all powerful, operating outside of the laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall be privileged and accepted as true and certain voices shall be heard as valued, while of course, many others are not. This oppressive distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within a time of crisis.

Agamben’s State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President George W. Bush on 13 November 2001, Agamben writes, “What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws" (Agamben, pg 3). Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until 7 July 2006, these individuals had been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration.

[edit] Auctoritas, "charisma" and Führertum doctrine

Agamben shows that auctoritas and potestas are clearly distinct – although they form together a binary system".^[23] He quotes Mommsen, who explains that auctoritas is "less than an order and more than an advice".^[24]

While potestas derives from social function, auctoritas "immediately derives from the patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charisma. This is why the tradition ordered, at the king's death, the creation of the sovereign’s wax-double in the funus imaginarium, as Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated in The King's Two Bodies (1957). Hence, it is necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure the continuity of dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas). Moreover, in the person detaining auctoritas – the sovereign – public life and private life have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes.

The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and Nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben:

To understand modern phenomena such as the fascist Duce or the Nazi Führer, it is important not to forget their continuity with the principle of auctoritas principis {Agamben refers here to Augustus's Res Gestae}. {...} Neither does the Duce nor the Führer represent constitutionally defined public charges – even though Mussolini and Hitler endorsed respectively the charge of head of government and Reich's chancellor, just as Augustus endorsed the imperium consulare or the potestas tribunicia. The Duce’s or the Führer’s qualities are immediately related to the physical person and belong to the biopolitical tradition of auctoritas and not to the juridical tradition of potestas

— ^[25]

Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.

Agamben concludes his chapter on "Auctoritas and potestas" writing:

It is significative that modern specialists were so inclined to admit that auctoritas was inherent to the living person of the pater or the princeps. What was evidently an ideology or a fictio aiming to be the groundwork of auctoritas ' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to potestas thus became a figure of right's {law – "droit"} immanence to life. (...) Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate itself each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} – the state of exception, justitium, the auctoritas principis, the Führertum -, put in use in more or less different circumstances, in the 1930s – overall, but not only – in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of auctoritas and elaborated in a Führertum doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In 1933, in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the Führung principle by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage" {"identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"} (we shall note the use of weberian concepts).

— ^[26]

Agamben’s thoughts on the state of emergency leads him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is thin indeed, as rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance. Agamben often reminds that Hitler never abrogated the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the whole duration of the 3rd Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933. Indefinite suspension of law is what characterizes the state of exception. Thus, Agamben connects Greek political philosophy through to the concentration camps of 20th century fascism, and even further, to detainment camps in the likes of Guantanamo Bay or immigration detention centers, such as Bari, Italy, where asylum seekers have been imprisoned in football stadiums. In these kinds of camps, entire zones of exception are being formed: the state of exception becomes a status under which certain categories of people live, a capture of life by right. Sovereign law makes it possible to create entire areas in which the application of the law itself is held suspended, which is the basis of Bush administration's definition of an "enemy combatant".

[edit] Interregnum, justitium and nomos empsuchos (the sovereign as "living law")

In the chapter preceding "Auctoritas and potestas", Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of justitium, a technical term referring to the state of exception, declared to cope with tumultus state (rebellion, uprising, riots...), at the end of the Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during interregnum periods:

The correspondence between justitium and mourning here shows its true signification. If the sovereign is a living nomos^{[disambiguation needed ]}, if then anomie and nomos coïncide in his person without any left-over, then anarchy (which, at his death, when the link attaching him to law his broken, threatens to unleash itself in the city) must be ritualized and controlled, by the transformation of the state of exception into public mourning and of mourning into justitium (...) Before acquiring the modern form of a decision on emergency {Schmitt's definition}, the relationship between sovereignty and state of exception presents itself under the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. As living law, the sovereign is deeply anomos. Here also the state of exception is the life – more secret and true – of the law.

— ^[27]

The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treatise "On law and justice" by pseudo-Archytas, conserved by Stobaeus with Diotogene's treatise on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of legitimacy.^{[citation needed]} This theory must be radically distinguished from natural rights theory or Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" by which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion).

Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign (basileus), who is the law, from the magistrate (archōn), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law (nomos empsuchos), hierarchically superior, and a written law (gramma), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas:

"I say that all communities are composed of an archōn (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign (ho men empsuchos ho basileus), and the inanimate one is the letter (gramma). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."^{[citation needed]}

Criticism of US response to "9–11"[link]

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to 11 September 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (zoe) and was akin to the tattooing that the Nazis did during World War II.^[28][29]

However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he points out in State of Exception (2005), rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been since then generalized and abused. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has become a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the Jews deportation in France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from identity cards.^[30] Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he explains is intrinsically related to the state of exception.

Endnotes and references[link]

Bibliography[link]

Agamben's major books are listed in order of first Italian publication (with the exception of Potentialities, which first appeared in English), and English translations are listed where available. There are translations of most writings in German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There is also an updated list of publications including translations to other languages and links to texts available at his faculty page.

• L'uomo senza contenuto (1970). Translated by Georgia Albert as The Man without Content (1999). 0-8047-3554-9
• Stanze. La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (1977). Trans. Ronald L. Martinez as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992). 0-8166-2038-5
• Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell'esperienza e origine della storia (1978). Trans. Liz Heron as Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993). 0-86091-645-6
• Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività (1982). Trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt as Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1991). ISBN 0-8166-4923-5
• Idea della prosa (1985). Trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt as Idea of Prose (1995). ISBN 0-7914-2380-8
• La comunità che viene (1990). Trans. Michael Hardt as The Coming Community (1993). ISBN 0-8166-2235-3
• Bartleby, la formula della creazione (1993, with Gilles Deleuze). Agamben's essay trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen in Potentialities, below (1999). ISBN 0-8047-3278-7. Deleuze's essay trans. in Deleuze, Essays Clinical and Critical (1997). ISBN 0-8166-2569-7
• Homo Sacer: Il potere soverano e la vita nuda (1995). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). ISBN 0-8047-3218-3
• Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica (1996). Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino as Means Without End: Notes of Politics (2000). ISBN 0-8166-3036-4
• Categorie italiane. Studi di poetica (1996). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999). ISBN 0-8047-3022-9
• Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L'archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III) (1998). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (2002). ISBN 1-890951-17-X
• Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (1999). First published in English translation and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen. ISBN 0-8047-3278-7. Published in the original Italian, with additional essays, as La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenza (2005).
• Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani (2000). Trans. Patricia Dailey as The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005). ISBN 0-8047-4383-5
• L'aperto. L'uomo e l'animale (2002). Trans. Kevin Attell as The Open: Man and Animal (2004). ISBN 0-8047-4738-5
• Stato di Eccezione. Homo sacer, 2,1 (2003). Trans. Kevin Attell as State of Exception (2005). ISBN 0-226-00925-4
• Profanazioni (2005). Trans. Jeff Fort as Profanations (2008). ISBN 1-890951-82-X
• Che cos'è un dispositivo? (2006). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9
• L'amico (2007). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9
• Ninfe (2007). Trans. Amanda Minervini as "Nymphs" in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (2011). ISBN 978-0-8047-6137-6
• Il regno e la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo. Homo sacer 2,2 (2007). Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini as The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (forthcoming August 2011). ISBN 978-0-8047-6016-4
• Che cos'è il contemporaneo? (2007). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9
• Signatura rerum. Sul Metodo (2008). Trans. Luca di Santo and Kevin Attell as The Signature of All Things: On Method (2009). ISBN 978-1-890951-98-6
• Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento. Homo sacer 2,3 (2008). Trans. Adam Kotsko as The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (2011).
• Nudità (2009). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella as Nudities (2010). ISBN 978-0-8047-6950-1
• Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (ed. Emanuele Coccia and Giorgio Agamben). Neripozza, Vicenza 2009.
• La Chiesa e il Regno (2010). ISBN 978-88-7452-226-2. Trans. Leland de la Durantaye as The Church and the Kingdom (forthcoming 2012). ISBN 978-0-85742-024-4.
• La ragazza indicibile. Mito e mistero di Kore (2010, with Monica Ferrando.) ISBN 978-88-370-7717-4.
• Altissima povertà. Regola e forma di vita nel monachesimo (2011). ISBN 978-88-545-0545-2.
• Opus Dei. Archeologia dell'ufficio (2011). ISBN 978-88-339-2247-8.

• Various articles published by Multitudes, available here.
• The State of Emergency, extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland Barthes-University of Paris VII, Denis Diderot
• (Italian) "Nei campi dei senza nome". Il Manifesto (Italy). 3 November 1998. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/nei-campi-dei-senza-nome/. 
• (French)"Gênes et la peste ("Genoa and the plague")". L'Humanité (France). 27 August 2001. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/genes-et-la-peste/. 

Video lectures[link]

• Agamben, Giorgio. Religious Movements. Université Paris 8. April 8, 2011. (French)
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Birth of Rules. Université Paris 8. April 1, 2011. (French)
• Agamben, Giorgio. I Will, I Command. Université Paris 8. February 18, 2011. (French)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Nacktheiten. 3Sat Kulturzeit, German TV. December 3, 2010 (German)
• Agamben, Giorgio. Aristotle's De Anima and the Division of Life. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. Forms of Power. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio (and Judith Butler). Eichmann, Law and Justice. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Problem of Subjectivity. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. Liturgia and the Modern State. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Process of the Subject in Michel Foucault. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. Literature and the Paradox of Monasticism. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Relation of Rule and Life. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. A Genealogy of Monasticism. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Sacrifice in Liturgy. European Graduate School. 2009
• Agamben, Giorgio. On Contemporaneity. European Graduate School. 2007
• Agamben, Giorgio. The Power and the Glory. Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). 01/11/2007
• Agamben, Giorgio. What is a Dispositive? European Graduate School. 2005
• Agamben, Giorgio. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand. European Graduate School. 2003.
• Agamben, Giorgio. What is a Paradigm. European Graduate School. 2002

Audio lectures[link]

• Agamben, Giorgio. What is a Commandment? Kingston University London. 2011

Further reading[link]

• Calarco, Matthew and Steven DeCaroli, eds. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Clemens, Justin, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, eds. The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
• de la Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1. Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoff Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 91-96, 315-334.
• Dickinson, Colby. Agamben and Theology. London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2011.
• Galindo Hervás, Alfonso. Política y mesianismo. Giorgio Agamben. Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 2005.
• Geulen, Eva. Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2005.
• Kishik, David. The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
• LaCapra, Dominick. "Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben". In History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 144-194.
• Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
• Murray, Alex. Giorgio Agamben. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
• Murray, Alex and Jessica Whyte. The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
• Neal, Andrew W., Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: Liberty, Security and the War on Terror. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
• Norris, Andrew, ed. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Ross, Alison, ed. The Agamben Effect. A special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 107, Number 1, Winter 2008.
• Wall, Thomas Carl. Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.
• Watkin, William. Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.
• Zartaloudis, Thanos. Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

See also[link]

Philosophy portal

• Agamben's explanation of Auctoritas
• Agamben's response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to decide state exception
• Basileus
• Homo sacer
• Interregnum
• Justitium
• Unlawful combatants

External links[link]

• Giorgio Agamben Faculty Page at European Graduate School
• Catherine Mills. Giorgio Agamben - Entry at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Review of Agamben, Profanations, by Daniel Ross
• On Giorgio Agamben's Profanations, by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
• Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life
• Review of State of Exception, by Brett Neilson
• (English)/(Italian) The Ripe Fruit of Redemption, by Toni Negri
• "Get Rid Of Yourself" starring Giorgio Agamben, by Bernadette Corporation.

French[link]

• "État d'exception" de G. Agamben, by Sandra Salomon
• "L'État d'exception ("State of Exception")". Le Monde (France). 12 December 2002. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/letat-dexception/. 
• "Une biopolitique mineure ("A minor biopolitic", interview with Agamben)". Vacarme. 1999 December. http://www.vacarme.org/article255.html. 

Italian[link]

• (Italian) filosofico.net Italian page dedicated to Agamben

Polish[link]

• (Polish) Projekt Agamben

Hebrew[link]

• Review of State of Exception, Yehouda Shenhav, Sfarim Haaretz, 23.11.2005.

This article is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (December 2007)

Fernando Pessoa
Photo by Victoriano Braga (1914)
Born	Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (1888-06-13)June 13, 1888 Lisbon, Portugal
Died	November 30, 1935(1935-11-30) (aged 47) Lisbon, Portugal
Pen name	Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares, etc.
Occupation	Poet, writer, and translator
Language	Portuguese, English, and French
Nationality	Portuguese
Period	1912–1935
Genres	Poetry, essay, theatre, fiction
Notable work(s)	The Book of Disquiet, Message
Notable award(s)	Queen Victoria Prize (1903) Antero de Quental Award (1934)
Influences Luís de Camões, Shakespeare, Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Charles Maurras, Marinetti, Antero de Quental, António Nobre, Cesário Verde.
Influenced Almada Negreiros, Giannina Braschi, Mário de Sá Carneiro, Octavio Paz, Miguel Torga, José Saramago,Juan Gelman, Gao Xingjian, Antonio Tabucchi, Alain Badiou, José Luís Peixoto
Signature

Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (June 13, 1888, Lisbon – November 30, 1935, Lisbon), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Early years in Durban[link]

Pessoa's birthplace: a large flat at São Carlos Square, in Lisbon.

On 13 July 1893, when Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. The following year, on 2 January, his younger brother Jorge, aged only one, also died. His mother, Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira, married again in December 1895. In the beginning of 1896, he moved with his mother to Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal, where his stepfather João Miguel dos Santos Rosa, a military officer, had been appointed Portuguese consul. The young Pessoa received his early education at St. Joseph Convent School, a Catholic grammar school run by Irish and French nuns. He moved to Durban High School in April, 1899, becoming fluent in English and developing an appreciation for English literature. During the Matriculation Examination, held at the time by the then University of the Cape of Good Hope, forerunner of the University of Cape Town, in November 1903, he was awarded the recently-created Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for best paper in English. While preparing to enter university, he also attended the Durban Commercial School during one year, in the evening shift. Meanwhile, he started writing short stories in English, some under the name of David Merrick, many of which he left unfinished.^[1]

Pessoa in Durban, 1898, aged 10.

At the age of sixteen, The Natal Mercury^[2] (July 6, 1904 edition) published his poem "Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme...", under the name of Charles Robert Anon, along with a brief introductory text: "I read with great amusement...". In December, The Durban High School Magazine published his essay "Macaulay".^[3] From February to June, 1905, in the section "The Man in the Moon," The Natal Mercury also published at least four sonnets by Fernando Pessoa: "Joseph Chamberlain", "To England I", "To England II" and "Liberty".^[4] His poems often carried humorous versions of Anon as the author's name. Pessoa started using pen names quite young. The first one, still in his childhood, was Chevalier de Pas, supposedly a French noble. In addition to David Merrick and Charles Robert Anon, the young writer also signed up, among other pen names, as Horace James Faber and Alexander Search, another meaningful pseudonym.

The young Pessoa as seen by a schoolfellow

Pessoa in 1901, aged 13.

« I cannot tell you exactly how long I knew him, but the period during which I received most of my impressions of him was the whole of the year 1904 when we were at school together. How old he was at this time I don’t know, but judge him to have 15 or 16.»

« He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes also a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes.»

« He was regarded as a brilliant clever boy as, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken English in his early years, he had learned it so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language. Although younger than his schoolfellows of the same class he appeared to have no difficulty in keeping up with and surpassing them in work. For one of his age, he thought much and deeply and in a letter to me once complained of “spiritual and material encumbrances of most especial adverseness”.»

« He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent on reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.»

— Clifford E. Geerdts, "Letter to Dr. Faustino Antunes", 04.10.1907.^[5]

Ten years after his arrival, he sailed for Lisbon via the Suez Canal on board the "Herzog", leaving Durban for good at the age of seventeen. This journey inspired the poems "Opiário" (dedicated to his friend, the poet and writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro) published in March, 1915, in Orpheu nr.1^[6] and "Ode Marítima" (dedicated to the futurist painter Santa Rita Pintor) published in June, 1915, in Orpheu nr.2^[7] by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos.

Adult life in Lisbon[link]

« Empreza Ibis, typographica e editora ».

While his family remained in South Africa, Pessoa returned to Lisbon in 1905 to study diplomacy. After a period of illness, and two years of poor results, a student strike against the dictatorship of Prime Minister João Franco put an end to his studies. Pessoa became a self student, a devoted reader who spent a lot of time at the library. In August, 1907, he started working at R.G. Dun & Company, an American mercantile information agency (currently D&B, Dun & Bradstreet). His grandmother died in September and left him a small inheritance, which he spent on setting up his own publishing house, the «Empreza Ibis». The venture was not a success and closed down in 1910, but the name ibis,^[8] the sacred bird of Ancient Egypt and inventor of the alphabet in Greek mythology, would remain an important symbolic reference for him.

Pessoa's last home, since 1920 till his death, in 1935, currently the Fernando Pessoa Museum

Upon his return to Lisbon, Pessoa began to complement his British education with Portuguese culture, as an autodidact. Pre-revolutionary atmosphere surrounding the assassination of King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe, in 1908, and patriotic environment resulting from the successful republican revolution, in 1910, certainly exerted a relevant influence in the formation of the writer. His stepuncle Henrique dos Santos Rosa, a retired general and poet, introduced the young Pessoa to Portuguese poetry, notably the romantics and symbolists of 19th century.^[9] In 1912, Fernando Pessoa entered the literary world with a critical essay, published in the cultural journal A Águia, which triggered one of the most important literary debates in the Portuguese intellectual world of 20th century: the polemic regarding a super-Camões. In 1915 a group of artists and poets, including Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros, created the literary magazine Orpheu,^[10] which introduced modernist literature to Portugal. Only two issues were published (Jan-Feb-Mar and Apr-May-Jun, 1915), the third failed to appear due to funding difficulties. Lost for many years, this issue was finally recovered and published in 1984.^[11] Among other writers and poets, Orpheu published Pessoa, orthonym, and the modernist heteronym, Álvaro de Campos.

Pessoa also founded the literary review Athena (1924–25), which published the heteronym Ricardo Reis. Along with his activity as free-lance commercial translator, Fernando Pessoa undertook intense activity as a writer and literary critic, contributing to journals and magazines such as A Águia (1912–13), A Renascença (1914), Orpheu (1915), Exílio (1916), Centauro (1916), Portugal Futurista (1917), Ressurreição (1920), Contemporânea (1922–23), Presença (1927–34) and Sudoeste (1935). He also published as a political analyst and literary critic in journals and newspapers such as Teatro (1913), O Jornal (1915), Centauro (1916), Acção (1919–20), Diário de Lisboa (1924–35), Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (1926) and Fama (1932–33).

[edit] Pessoa the flâneur

Pessoa, a flâneur in the streets of Lisbon.

If Franz Kafka is the writer of Prague, Fernando Pessoa is certainly the writer of Lisbon. After his return to Portugal, when he was seventeen, Pessoa barely left his beloved city, which inspired the poems "Lisbon Revisited" (1923 and 1926), by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. From 1905 to 1921, when his family returned from Pretoria after the death of his stepfather, he lived in fifteen different places around the city,^[12] moving from a rented room to another according to his financial troubles and the troubles of the young Portuguese Republic.

Coffee house "A Brasileira", established in 1905, the year Pessoa returned to Lisbon.

Pessoa had the flâneur's regard, namely through the eyes of Bernardo Soares, another of his heteronyms.^[13] This character was supposedly an accountant, working at an office in Douradores Street, where Vasques was the boss. Bernardo Soares also supposedly lived in the same downtown street, a world that Pessoa knew quite well due to his long career as free lance correspondence translator. In fact, from 1907 until his death, in 1935, Pessoa worked in twenty one firms located in Lisbon's downtown, sometimes in two or three of them simultaneously.^[14] In The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares describes some of those typical places and its "atmosphere".

Pessoa was a frequent customer at Martinho da Arcada, a centennial coffeehouse in Comercio Square, surrounded by ministries, almost an "office" for his private business and literary concerns, where he used to meet friends in the 1920s. He also frequented other coffee shops, pubs and restaurants, a number of which no longer exist. The statue of Fernando Pessoa (below) can be seen outside A Brasileira, one of the preferred places of the young writers and artists of the group of orpheu during the 1910s. This coffeehouse, in the aristocratic district of Chiado, is quite close to Pessoa's birthplace: 4, Largo de São Carlos (in front of the Opera House),^[15] one of the most elegant neighborhoods of Lisbon.^[16]

In 1925, Pessoa wrote in English a guidebook to Lisbon but it remained unpublished until 1992.^[17][18]

Literature and occultism[link]

Pessoa's mediumship:
Automatic writing sample.

Pessoa translated into English some Portuguese books^[19] and from English The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne^[20] and the poems "The Raven", "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume"^[21] by Edgar Allan Poe who, along with Walt Whitman, strongly influenced him. He also translated into Portuguese a number of books by leading theosophists such as C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant.^[22]

In 1912-1914, while living with his aunt "Anica" and cousins,^[23] Pessoa took part in "semi-spiritualist sessions" that were carried out at home. But he was considered a "delaying element" by the other members of the session. Pessoa's interest in spiritualism was truly awoken in the second half of 1915, when he translated a series of esoteric books. This was further deepened in the end of March 1916, when he suddenly started having experiences where he became a medium. The experiences were revealed through automatic writing. In June, 24, Pessoa wrote an impressive letter to his aunt, then living in Switzerland with her daughter and son in law, in which he describes this "mystery case" that surprised him.

Besides automatic writing, Pessoa also had "astral" or "etherial visions" and was able to see "magnetic auras" similar to radiographic images. He felt "more curiosity than scare", but was respectful towards this phenomenon and asked secrecy, because "there is no advantage, but a lot of disadvantages" in speaking about this. Mediumship exerted a strong influence in Pessoa writings, who felt "sometimes suddenly being owned by something else" or having a "very curious sensation" in the right arm that "was lifted into the air without my will". Looking in the mirror, Pessoa saw several times the heteronyms, his "face fading out" and being replaced by the one of "a bearded man", or another one, four men in total.^[24]

Astral chart of the heteronym
Ricardo Reis by Fernando Pessoa.

Pessoa also developed a strong interest in astrology, becoming a competent astrologist. He elaborated more than 1,500 astrological charts, of well-known people like William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Maximilien Robespierre, Napoleon I, Wilhelm II, Leopold II of Belgium, Victor Emmanuel III, Benito Mussolini, Alfonso XIII, or the Kings Sebastian and Carlos of Portugal and Salazar. In 1915, Pessoa created the heteronym Raphael Baldaya, who was an astrologist, and planned to write in his name "System of Astrology" and "Introduction to the Study of Occultism". Pessoa established the pricing of his astrological services from 500 to 5,000 réis and made horoscopes of costumers, friends and also himself and, astonishingly, of the heteronyms.

Born on June, 13, Pessoa was native of Gemini and had scorpio as rising sign. The characters of the main heteronyms were inspired by the four astral elements: air, fire, water and earth. It means that Pessoa and his heteronyms altogether comprised the full principles of ancient knowledge. All those heteronyms were designed according to their horoscopes, all include Mercury, the planet of literature. Astrology was part of his everyday life and Pessoa kept that interest until his death, which he was able to predict with a certain degree of accuracy.^[25]

As a mysticist, Pessoa was an enthusiast of esotericism, occultism, hermetism and alchemy. Along with spiritualism and astrology, he also paid attention to rosicrucianism, neopaganism and freemasonry, which strongly influenced his work. His interest in occultism led Pessoa to correspond with Aleister Crowley. Later he helped Crowley plan an elaborate fake suicide when he visited Portugal in 1930.^[26] Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan"^[27] into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's library shows that he possessed Crowley's books Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral.^[28]

Writing a lifetime[link]

Pessoa in 1928, drinking a glass of red wine in Lisbon's downtown.

In his early years, Pessoa was influenced by major English classic poets as Shakespeare, Milton or Spenser and romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Later, when he returned to Lisbon for good, he was influenced by French symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Maurice Rollinat, Stéphane Mallarmé; mainly by Portuguese poets as Antero de Quental, Gomes Leal, Cesário Verde, António Nobre, Camilo Pessanha or Teixeira de Pascoaes. Later on, he was also influenced by modernists as Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among many other writers.^[1]

During World War I, Pessoa wrote to a number of British publishers in order to print his collection of English verse The Mad Fiddler (unpublished during his lifetime), but it was refused. However, in 1920, the prestigious literary journal Athenaeum included one of those poems.^[29] Since the British publication failed, in 1918 Pessoa published in Lisbon two slim volumes of English verse: Antinous^[30] and 35 Sonnets,^[31] received by the British literary press without enthusiasm.^[32] Along with some friends, he founded another publishing house, Olisipo, which published in 1921 a further two English poetry volumes: English Poems I–II and English Poems III by Fernando Pessoa.

Politically, Pessoa considered himself a "mystical nationalist" and, despite his monarchist sympathies, he didn't favour the restoration of the monarchy. He described himself as conservative within the British tradition. He was an outspoken elitist and aligned himself against communism, socialism, fascism and Catholicism. He supported the military coups of 1917 and 1926, and wrote a pamphlet in 1928 supportive of the Military Dictatorship but after the establishment of the New State, in 1933, Pessoa become disenchanted with the regime and wrote critically of Salazar and fascism in general. He also wrote in defense of Freemasonry when it was banned by the Salazar regimen in 1935.^[33][34]

Pessoa's tomb in Lisbon, at the cloister of the Hieronymites Monastery since 1988.

Pessoa died of cirrhosis in 1935, at the age of forty-seven, with only one book published in Portuguese: "Mensagem" (Message). However, he left a lifetime of unpublished and unfinished work (over 25,000 pages manuscript and typed that have been housed in the Portuguese National Library since 1988). The heavy burden of editing this huge work is still in progress. In 1988 (the centenary of his birth), Pessoa's remains were moved to the Hieronymites Monastery, in Lisbon, where Vasco da Gama, Luís de Camões, and Alexandre Herculano are also buried. Pessoa's portrait was on the 100-escudo banknote.

Heteronyms[link]

Pessoa's statue outside Lisbon's famous coffeehouse «A Brasileira».

Pessoa's earliest heteronym, at the age of six, was Chevalier de Pas. Other childhood heteronyms included Dr. Pancrácio and David Merrick, followed by Charles Robert Anon, an English young man that became Pessoa's alter ego. In 1906/7, when Pessoa was a student at Lisbon's University, Alexander Search took the place of Anon. The main reason for this was that, although Search is English, he was born born in Lisbon as his author. But Search represents a transition heteronym that Pessoa used while searching to adapt to the Portuguese cultural reality. After the republican revolutuon, in 1910, and consequent patriotic atmosphera, Pessoa created another alter ego, Álvaro de Campos, supposedly a Portuguese naval engineer graduated in Glasgow. Translator Richard Zenith notes that Pessoa eventually established at least seventy-two heteronyms.^[35] According to Pessoa himself, there were three main heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. The heteronyms possess distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles.^[36]

Fernando Pessoa on the heteronyms

« How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as "me myself" instead of "I myself", etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive...). »

— Fernando Pessoa, "Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro", 13.01.1935, translated by Richard Zenith.^[37]

List of known heteronyms[link]

Alberto Caeiro[link]

Alberto Caeiro was Pessoa's first great heteronym; summarized by Pessoa, writing: He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower... the only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him... this way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry.^{[citation needed]}

What this means, and what makes Caeiro such an original poet is the way he apprehends existence. He does not question anything whatsoever; he calmly accepts the world as it is. The recurrent themes to be found in nearly all of Caeiro's poems are wide-eyed child-like wonder at the infinite variety of nature, as noted by a critic. He is free of metaphysical entanglements. Central to his world-view is the idea that in the world around us, all is surface: things are precisely what they seem, there is no hidden meaning anywhere.

He manages thus to free himself from the anxieties that batter his peers; for Caeiro, things simply exist and we have no right to credit them with more than that. Our unhappiness, he tells us, springs from our unwillingness to limit our horizons. As such, Caeiro attains happiness by not questioning, and by thus avoiding doubts and uncertainties. He apprehends reality solely through his eyes, through his senses. What he teaches us is that if we want to be happy we ought to do the same. Octavio Paz called him the innocent poet. Paz made a shrewd remark on the heteronyms: In each are particles of negation or unreality. Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn't believe in anything. He exists.^[38]

Poetry before Caeiro was essentially interpretative; what poets did was to offer an interpretation of their perceived surroundings; Caeiro does not do this. Instead, he attempts to communicate his senses, and his feelings, without any interpretation whatsoever.

Caeiro attempts to approach Nature from a qualitatively different mode of apprehension; that of simply perceiving (an approach akin to phenomenological approaches to philosophy). Poets before him would make use of intricate metaphors to describe what was before them; not so Caeiro: his self-appointed task is to bring these objects to the reader's attention, as directly and simply as possible. Caeiro sought a direct experience of the objects before him.

As such it is not surprising to find that Caeiro has been called an anti-intellectual, anti-Romantic, anti-subjectivist, anti-metaphysical...an anti-poet, by critics; Caeiro simply—is. He is in this sense very unlike his creator Fernando Pessoa: Pessoa was besieged by metaphysical uncertainties; these were, to a large extent, the cause of his unhappiness; not so Caeiro: his attitude is anti-metaphysical; he avoided uncertainties by adamantly clinging to a certainty: his belief that there is no meaning behind things. Things, for him, simply—are.

Caeiro represents a primal vision of reality, of things. He is the pagan incarnate. Indeed Caeiro was not simply a pagan but paganism itself.^[39]

The critic Jane M. Sheets sees the insurgence of Caeiro—who was Pessoa's first major heteronym—as essential in founding the later poetic personas: By means of this artless yet affirmative anti-poet, Caeiro, a short-lived but vital member of his coterie, Pessoa acquired the base of an experienced and universal poetic vision. After Caeiro's tenets had been established, the avowedly poetic voices of Campos, Reis and Pessoa himself spoke with greater assurance.^[40]

Ricardo Reis[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Reis sums up his philosophy of life in his own words, admonishing: 'See life from a distance. Never question it. There's nothing it can tell you.' Like Caeiro, whom he admires, Reis defers from questioning life. He is a modern pagan who urges one to seize the day and accept fate with tranquility. 'Wise is the one who does not seek', he says; and continues: 'the seeker will find in all things the abyss, and doubt in himself.'^{[citation needed]} In this sense Reis shares essential affinities with Caeiro.

Believing in the Greek gods, yet living in a Christian Europe, Reis feels that his spiritual life is limited, and true happiness cannot be attained. This, added to his belief in Fate as a driving force for all that exists, as such disregarding freedom, leads to his epicureanist philosophy, which entails the avoidance of pain, defending that man should seek tranquility and calm above all else, avoiding emotional extremes.

Where Caeiro wrote freely and spontaneously, with joviality, of his basic, meaningless connection to the world, Reis writes in an austere, cerebral manner, with premeditated rhythm and structure and a particular attention to the correct use of the language, when approaching his subjects of, as characterized by Richard Zenith,'the brevity of life, the vanity of wealth and struggle, the joy of simple pleasures, patience in time of trouble, and avoidance of extremes'.

In his detached, intellectual approach, he is closer to Fernando Pessoa's constant rationalization, as such representing the ortonym's wish for measure and sobriety and a world free of troubles and respite, in stark contrast to Caeiro's spirit and style. As such, where Caeiro's predominant attitude is that of joviality, his sadness being accepted as natural ('My sadness,' Caeiro says, 'is a comfort for it is natural and right.'), Reis is marked by melancholy, saddened by the impermanence of all things.

Ricardo Reis is the main character of José Saramago's 1986 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

Álvaro de Campos[link]

Álvaro de Campos manifests, in a way, as an hyperbolic version of Pessoa himself. Of the three heteronyms he is the one who feels most strongly, his motto being 'to feel everything in every way.' 'The best way to travel,' he wrote, 'is to feel.' As such, his poetry is the most emotionally intense and varied, constantly juggling two fundamental impulses: on the one hand a feverish desire to be and feel everything and everyone, declaring that 'in every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god '(alluding to Walt Whitman's desire to 'contain multitudes'), on the other, a wish for a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness.

As a result, his mood and principles varied between violent, dynamic exultation, as he fervently wishes to experience the entirety of the universe in himself, in all manners possible (a particularly distinctive trait in this state being his futuristic leanings, including the expression of great enthusiasm as to the meaning of city life and its components) and a state of nostalgic melancholy, where life is viewed as, essentially, empty.

One of the poet's constant preoccupations, as part of his dichotomous character, is that of identity: he does not know who he is, or rather, fails at achieving an ideal identity. Wanting to be everything, and inevitably failing, he despairs. Unlike Caeiro, who asks nothing of life, he asks too much. In his poetic meditation 'Tobacco Shop' he asks:

How should I know what I'll be, I who don't know what I am?

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!

Fernando Pessoa-himself[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

'Fernando Pessoa-himself' is not the 'real' Fernando Pessoa. Like Caeiro, Reis and Campos—Pessoa 'himself' embodies only aspects of the poet Fernando Pessoa's personality is not stamped in any given voice; his personality is diffused through the heteronyms. For this reason 'Fernando Pessoa-himself' stands apart from the poet proper.

'Pessoa' shares many essential affinities with his peers, Caeiro and Campos in particular. Lines crop up in his poems that may as well be ascribed to Campos or Caeiro. It is useful to keep this in mind as we read this exposition.

The critic Leland Guyer sums up 'Pessoa': "the poetry of the orthonymic Fernando Pessoa normally possesses a measured, regular form and appreciation of the musicality of verse. It takes on intellectual issues, and it is marked by concern with dreams, the imagination and mystery."^{[citation needed]}

Richard Zenith calls 'Pessoa' '[Pessoa's] most intellectual and analytic poetic persona.'^{[citation needed]} Like Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa-himself was afflicted with an acute identity crisis. Pessoa-himself has been described as indecisive and doubt plagued, as restless. Like Campos he can be melancholic, weary, resigned. The strength of Pessoa-himself's poetry rests in his ability to suggest a sense of loss; of sorrow for what can never be.

A constant theme in Pessoa's poetry is Tédio, or Tedium. The dictionary defines this word simply as 'a condition of being tedious; tediousness or boredom.' This definition does not sufficiently encompass the peculiar brand of tedium experienced by Pessoa-himself. His is more than simple boredom: it is from a world of weariness and disgust with life; a sense of the finality of failure; of the impossibility of having anything to want.

Summaries of selected works[link]

[edit] Message

Mensagem, 1st. edition, 1934.

Mensagem in Portuguese (from the Latin "MENS AGitat molEM", which means, "The Mind moves/commands the Matter), is a very unusual twentieth century book: it is a symbolist epic made up of 44 short poems organized in three parts or Cycles:^[41]

The first, called "Brasão" (Coat-of-Arms), relates Portuguese historical protagonists to each of the fields and charges in the Portuguese coat-of-arms. The first two poems ("The castles" and "The escutcheons") draw inspiration from the material and spiritual natures of Portugal. Each of the remaining poems associates to each charge a historical personality. Ultimately they all lead to the Golden Age of Discovery.

The second Part, called "Mar Português" (Portuguese Sea), references the country's Age of Portuguese Exploration and to its seaborne Empire that ended with the death of King Sebastian at Ksar-el-Kebir (in 1578). Pessoa brings the reader to the present as if he had woken up from a dream of the past, to fall in a dream of the future: he sees King Sebastian returning and still bent on accomplishing a Universal Empire, like King Arthur heading for Avalon to come back in England's hour of need.

The third Cycle, called "O Encoberto" ("The Hidden One"), is the most disturbing. It refers to Pessoa's vision of a future world of peace and the Fifth Empire. After the Age of Force, (Vis), and Taedium (Otium) will come Science (understanding) through a reawakening of "The Hidden One", or "King Sebastian". The Hidden One represents the fulfillment of the destiny of mankind, designed by God since before Time, and the accomplishment of Portugal.

One of the most famous quotes from Mensagem is the first line from O Infante (belonging to the second Part), which is Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce (which translates roughly to "God wills it, man dreams it, it is born"). That means 'Only by God's will man does', a full comprehension of man's subjection to God's wealth. Another well-known quote from Mensagem is the first line from Ulysses, "O mito é o nada que é tudo" (a possible translation is "The myth is the nothing that is all"). This poem refers Ulysses, king of Ithaca, as Lisbon's founder (recalling an ancient Greek myth).^[42]

Literary essays[link]

A Águia, journal of the Portuguese Renaissance, nr. 4, April 1912.

In 1912, Fernando Pessoa wrote a set of essays (later collected as The New Portuguese Poetry) for the cultural journal A Águia (The Eagle), founded in Oporto, in December 1910, and run by the republican association Renascença Portuguesa.^[43] In the first years of the Portuguese Republic, this cultural association was started by republican intellectuals led by the writer and poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, philosopher Leonardo Coimbra and historian Jaime Cortesão, aiming for the renewal of Portuguese culture through the aesthetic movement called Saudosismo.^[44] Pessoa contributed to the journal A Águia with a series of papers: 'The new Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered' (nr. 4), 'Relapsing...' (nr. 5) and 'The Psychological Aspect of the new Portuguese Poetry' (nrs. 9,11 and 12). These writings were strongly encomiastic to saudosist literature, namely the poetry of Teixeira de Pascoaes and Mário Beirão. The articles disclose Pessoa as a connoisseur of modern European literature and an expert of recent literary trends. On the other hand, he does not care much for a methodology of analysis or problems in the history of ideas. He states his confidence that Portugal would soon produce a great poet - a super-Camões – pledged to make an important contribution for European culture, and indeed, for humanity.^[45]

Philosophical essays[link]

The philosophical notes of young Fernando Pessoa, mostly written between 1905 and 1912, illustrate his debt to the history of Philosophy more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics, ancient or modern.^{[citation needed]} The issues he engages with pertain to every philosophical discipline and concern a large profusion of concepts, creating a vast semantic spectrum in texts whose length oscillates between half a dozen lines and half a dozen pages and whose density of analysis is extremely variable; simple paraphrasis, expression of assumptions and original speculation.

Pessoa sorted the philosophical systems thus:

A passage from his famous poem "Mar Português" from "Message", in the city of Lagos, Portugal.

1. Relative Spiritualism and relative Materialism privilege "Spirit" or "Matter" as the main pole that organizes data around Experience.
2. Absolute Spiritualist and Absolute Materialist "deny all objective reality to one of the elements of Experience".
3. The materialistic Pantheism of Spinoza and the spiritualizing Pantheism of Malebranche, "admit that experience is a double manifestation of any thing that in its essence has no matter neither spirit".
4. Considering both elements as an illusory manifestation", of a transcendent and true and alone realities, there is Transcendentalism, inclined into matter with Schopenhauer, or into spirit, a position where Bergson could be emplaced.
5. A terminal system "the limited and summit of metaphysics" would not radicalize - as poles of experience one of the singled categories - matter, relative, absolute, real, illusory, spirit. Instead, matching all categories, it takes contradiction as "the essence of the universe" and defends that "an affirmation is so more true insofar the more contradiction involves". The transcendent must be conceived beyond categories. There is one only and eternal example of it. It is that cathedral of thought -the philosophy of Hegel.

Such pantheist transcendentalism is used by Pessoa to define the project that "encompasses and exceeds all systems"; to characterize the new poetry of Saudosismo where the "typical contradiction of this system" occurs; to inquire of the particular social and political results of its adoption as the leading cultural paradigm; and, at last, he hints that metaphysics and religiosity strive "to find in everything a beyond".

Works[link]

• Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos, 2, Chris Daniels, transl, Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2009 [1928–35], ISBN 978-1-905700-25-7, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2009/pessoa_campos.html 
• Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See, Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2008, ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978190570752|978190570752]], http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2008/pessoa_lisbon.html 
• The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Chris Daniels, transl, Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-905700-24-0, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/pessoa_caeiro.html 
• Selected English Poems, Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-905700-26-4, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/pessoa_engl.html 
• Message, Jonathan Griffin, transl, Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-905700-27-1, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/pessoa_msg.html 
• Selected English Poems , ed. Tony Frazer, Exeter (UK): Shearsman Books, 2007. ISBN 1-905700-26-1
• A Centenary Pessoa, tr. Keith Bosley & L. C. Taylor, foreword by Octavio Paz, Carcanet Press, 2006. ISBN 1-85754-724-1
• A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2006. ISBN 0-14-303955-5
• The Education of the Stoic, tr. Richard Zenith, afterword by Antonio Tabucchi, Exact Change, 2004. ISBN 1-878972-40-5
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith, Penguin classics, 2003. ISBN 978-0-14-118304-6
• The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, tr. Richard Zenith, Grove Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8021-3914-0
• Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Transelation of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, tr. Eirin Moure, House of Anansi, 2001. ISBN 0-88784-660-2
• The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith, transl, New York, USA: Grove Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8021-3914-6, http://books.google.pt/books?id=yrp9Fu168uYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• Selected Poems: with New Supplement tr. Jonathan Griffin, Penguin Classics; 2nd edition, 2000. ISBN 0-14-118433-7
• Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith, Grove Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8021-3627-3
• Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Edwin Honig & Susan Brown, transl, San Francisco, USA: City Lights Books, 1998, ISBN 978-0-87286-342-2, http://books.google.pt/books?id=klT3KN2V2JgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• The Keeper of Sheep, bilingual edition, tr. Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown, Sheep Meadow, 1997. ISBN 1-878818-45-7
• Message, tr. Jonathan Griffin, introduction by Helder Macedo, Menard Press, 1992. ISBN 1-905700-27-X
• The Book of Disquietude, tr. Richard Zenith, Carcanet Press, 1991. ISBN 0-14-118304-7
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Iain Watson, Quartet Books, 1991. ISBN 0-7043-0153-9
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Alfred Mac Adam, New York NY: Pantheon Books, 1991. ISBN 0-679-40234-9
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, London, New York NY: Serpent's Tail, 1991, ISBN 1-85242-204-1
• Fernando Pessoa: Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems, tr. George Monteiro, Gavea-Brown Publications, 1989. ISBN 0-943722-14-4
• Always Astonished, tr. Edwin Honig, San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 1988. ISBN 978-0-87286-228-9
• Always Astonished: selected prose, Edwin Honig, transl, San Francisco, USA: City Lights Books, 1988, ISBN 978-0-87286-228-9, http://books.google.pt/books?id=XZYYXErWaB0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• Selected Poems, tr. Edwin Honig, Swallow Press, 1971. ISBN B000XU4FE4
• English Poems, 2 vol. (vol. 1 part I – Antinous, part II – Inscriptions; vol. 2 part III – Epithalamium), Lisbon: Olisipo, 1921 (vol. 1, 20 pp.; vol. 2, 16 pp., 24 cm). Portugal: PURL.
• 35 Sonnets, Lisbon: Monteiro & Co., 1918 (20 pp., 20 cm). Portugal: PURL.
• Antinous: a poem, Lisbon: Monteiro & Co., 1918 (16 p., 20 cm). Portugal: PURL.
• The anarchist banker and other Portuguese stories Carcanet Press, 1996

See also[link]

• Orpheu
• heteronym
• Portuguese Poetry
• Andrés Fischer Muñoz
• The Book Of Disquietude
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Books[link]

• Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa Jackson, Kenneth David, 2010.
• Embodying Pessoa: corporeality, gender, sexuality / Klobucka, Anna and Mark Sabine, eds. 2007 (Portuguese edition 2010).
• Portuguese Writers (Dictionary of Literary Biography) / Rector, Mónica. 2004
• Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa's turn in Anglo-American Modernism Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho Sousa 2003
• Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds / Bloom, Harold. 2002
• Spanish and Portuguese literatures and their times: The Iberian peninsula / Moss, Joyce. 2002
• Stevens, Dana Shawn, "A local habitation and a name heteronymy and nationalism in Fernando Pessoa", PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 2001
• Modernism's Gambit: Poetry Problems and Chess Stratagemes in Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges / Peña, Karen Patricia. 2000
• Fernando Pessoa and nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature Monteiro, George 2000
• Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro / (Issue of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth). 2000
• Dreams of dreams: and, The last three days of Fernando Pessoa / Tabucchi, Antonio. 1999
• The presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African literary responses Monteiro, George 1998
• An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship Sadlier, Darlene 1998
• Modern art in Portugal: 1910-1940 : the artist contemporaries of Fernando Pessoa / Serra, Joao. 1998
• A Centenary Pessoa / Pessoa, Fernando. 1997
• Fernando Pessoa: photographic documentation and caption / Lancastre, Maria Jose de. 1997
• Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul / Kotowicz, Zbigniew. 1996
• The Western Canon / Bloom, Harold. 1994
• The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: the Life after the Life / Martin, Robert. 1992
• Fernando Pessoa: the Bilingual Portuguese Poet Terlinden-Villepin, Anne 1990
• Three Persons on One: A Centenary Tribute to Fernando Pessoa / McGuirk, Bernard. 1988
• Modern Spanish and Portuguese literatures / Marshall J Schneider. 1988
• Fernando Pessoa, a Galaxy of Poets / Carvalho, Maria Helena Rodrigues de. 1985
• Fernando Pessoa's The Mad Fiddler: A Critical Study / Terlinden-Villepin, Anne. 1984
• The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa / Monteiro, George. 1982
• Fernando Pessoa: the genesis of the heteronyms / Green, J. C. R. 1982
• Spatial Imagery of Enclosure in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa / Guyer, Leland Robert. 1979
• The Role of the Other in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa / Jones, Marilyn Scarantino. 1974
• Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa / Rickard, Peter. 1972
• Studies in modern Portuguese literature / Faria, Almeida. 1971
• Three Twentieth-Century Portuguese Poets / Parker M., John. 1960

Articles[link]

• Riccardi, Mattia, "Dionysus or Apollo? The heteronym Antonio Mora as moment of Nietzsche's reception by Pessoa" in Portuguese Studies 23 (1), 109, 2007.
• Suarez, Jose, "Fernando Pessoa's acknowledged involvement with the occult" in Hispania 90 (2): 245-252, May 2007.
• De Castro, Mariana, "Oscar Wilde, Fernando Pessoa, and the art of lying" in Portuguese Studies 22 (2): 219-+ 2006
• Beyer, Bethany, "Borges and Pessoa: Authorial voices and esoteric reflections", M.A. Dissertation, Brigham Young University., 2006
• Ribeiro, A. S., "A tradition of empire: Fernando Pessoa and Germany" in Portuguese Studies 21: 201-209 2005
• Hale, Michelle, "Ironic multiplicity: Fernando's "pessoas" suspended in Kierkegaardian irony", M. A. Dissertation, Brigham Young University., 2004
• McNeill, Pods, "The aesthetic of fragmentation and the use of personae in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and W.B. Yeats" in Portuguese Studies 19: 110-121 2003
• Muldoon P., "In the hall of mirrors: 'Autopsychography' by Fernando Pessoa" in New England Review 23 (4), Fal 2002, pp. 38–52
• Bloom, Harold, "Fernando Pessoa", in Genius: a mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds: Pub. New York: Warner Books., 2002
• Steiner, George, "A man of many parts" in The Observer, Sunday, 3 June 2001.
• Wallace, James, "Camões, Pessoa, Bloom and the poetry of heteronomy as solution for the anxiety of influence", M.A. Dissertation, Brigham Young University, 2000.
• Bamforth, I., "An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the paradoxes of authorship" in Parnassus 24 (1), 1999, pp. 286–303.
• Bamforth, I., "The presence of Pessoa: English, American and Southern African literary responses" Parnassus 24 (1), 1999, pp. 286–303.
• Hicks, J., "The Fascist imaginary in Pessoa and Pirandello" in Centennial Review 42 (2): 309-332 SPR 1998
• Mahr, G., "Pessoa, life narrative, and the dissociative process" in Biography 21 (1) Winter 1998, pp. 25–35.
• Haberly, David T., "Fernando Pessoa: Overview" in Reference Guide to World Literature, second ed., edited by Lesley Henderson, St. James Press, 1995.
• Lopes J. M., "Cubism and intersectionism in Fernando Pessoa's 'Chuva Obliqua" in Texte(15-16),1994, pp. 63–95.
• Zenith, Richard, "Pessoa, Fernando and the Theater of his Self" in Performing Arts Journal(44), May 1993, pp. 47–49.
• Anderson, R. N., "The Static Drama of Pessoa, Fernando" in Hispanofila (104): 89-97 January 1992
• Severino, Alexandrino E., "Was Pessoa Ever in South Africa?" in Hispania, Volume 74, Number 3, September 1991
• Brown, S.M., "The Whitman Pessoa Connection" in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (1): 1-14 SUM 1991.
• Eberstadt, Fernanda, "Proud of His Obscurity", in The New York Times Book Review, Vol 96, September 1, 1991, p. 26.
• Dyer, Geoff, "Heteronyms" in The New Statesman, Vol. 4, December 6, 1991, p. 46.
• Monteiro, George, "The Song of the Reaper-Pessoa and Wordsworth" in Portuguese Studies 5, 1989, pp. 71–80.
• Cruz, Anne J., "Masked Rhetoric: Contextuality in Fernando Pessoa's Poems", in Romance Notes, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 55–60.
• Hollander, John, "Quadrophenia", in New Republic, September 7, 1987, pp. 33–6.
• Rosenthal, David H., "Unpredictable Passions", in The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1987, p. 32.
• Guyer, Leland, "Fernando Pessoa and the Cubist Perspective", in Hispania, Vol. 70, No. 1, March 1987, pp. 73–78.
• Bunyan, D, "The South-African Pessoa: Fernando 20th Century Portuguese Poet", in English in Africa 14 (1), May 1987, pp. 67–105.
• Seabra, J.A., "Pessoa, Fernando Portuguese Modernist Poet", in Europe 62 (660): 41-53 1984
• Severino, Alexandrino E., "Pessoa, Fernando - A Modern Lusiad", in Hispania 67 (1): 52-60 1984
• Howes, R. W., "Pessoa, Fernando, Poet, Publisher, and Translator", in British Library Journal 9 (2): 161-170 1983
• Sousa, Ronald W., "The Structure of Pessoa's Mensagem", in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 1, January 1982, pp. 58–66.
• Severino, Alexandrino E., "Fernando Pessoa's Legacy: The Presença and After", in World Literature Today, Vol. 53, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp. 5–9.
• Jennings, Hubert D., "In Search of Fernando Pessoa" in Contrast 47 - South African Quarterly, Volume 12 No. 3, June 1979.
• Wood, Michael, "Mod and Great" in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XIX, No. 4, September 21, 1972, pp. 19–22.
• Sheets, Jane M., "Fernando Pessoa as Anti-Poet: Alberto Caeiro", in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, January 1969, pp. 39–47.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Fernando Pessoa

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fernando Pessoa

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Fernando Pessoa

• Pessoa's Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (Fernando Pessoa House)
• Pessoa's private library (online digital library at Pessoa's Museum)
• ANTINOUS at Portuguese National Library
• 35 SONNETS at Portuguese National Library
• MESSAGE, the only Portuguese book published by Pessoa
• Works by or about Fernando Pessoa in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Pessoa's Biography at Shearsman Books
• Tribute to Fernando Pessoa
• Poets.org Biography
• The Magical World of Fernando Pessoa by Gary Lachman
• Fernando Pessoa at Astrotheme
• Poems of Fernando Pessoa
• Pessoa's trunk 13+ ways of looking at a poem
• Arquivo Pessoa
• Free Android App