Personal Infinitive: Inflecting Fernando Pessoa - Pessoa Studies

To state that the writings of Fernando Pessoa anticipate deconstruction is to draw attention to what is always already waiting to happen in his texts. The unfinished is a requisite that each reading may elicit and highlight as it strives to curve, to bend, to open up again, to inflect, the writings that have beguiled so easily those of his many critics determined on and by interpretative closure. The meanings in and of Pessoa's works cannot be restricted by any putative subjection of the text and textuality to a theory, a presence, or disciplinary outlook. This study proposes multiple openings, readings which unapologetically pursue an implicit dialogue between critical thinking and literary performance; between a close reading of texts signed by Fernando Pessoa and a focus on the language structuring closely woven critical and literary discourses. Not least, the manifestation of different and differential textual subjectivities (a. k. a. "heteronyms") is shown to be underwritten and simultaneously undermined by the writing(s) of and under the signature "Fernando Pessoa".