Fernando Pessoa between politics and prophecy

The recent re-release of “Politics and prophecy. Notes and fragments. 1910-1935 " for the Bietti editions the discussion reopens on the peculiar political conception of the Portuguese poet, one of the most significant of the “short century”.

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di Luke Siniscalco

 

Il Pessoa case back to the fore - philosophical and editorial. It happens almost twenty years after the heated discussion that set fire to the most prestigious Italian newspapers, and which saw the cultural agitators engaged in the understanding of Political and esoteric pessoa oppose the solons of poetically correct, all aimed at normalizing the figure plural of the Portuguese genius by defusing the ideal bomb underlying his work. It is a return due to the meritorious cultural operation of the Milanese publishing house Bietti, which is responsible for the recent republication of Politics and prophecy. Notes and fragments. 1910-1935, a collection of pessoan steps edited by the Lusitanist Brunello N. De Cusatis, as well as in a systematic revision of the work, in an extensive introduction to the second edition of the volume.

This is precisely where the Pessoa case is reopened and discussed starting from a close comparison with an article by Antonio Tabucchi, which appeared in the Corriere della Sera in May 2001. De Cusatis effectively shows the inanity of the attempts of some exegetes aimed at minimizing or discrediting, as if they were simple projections of the game of the heteronymous Pessoans, the author's political statements. His thesis is convincing: it is possible to draw from the notes and fragments of the Portuguese writer a Worldview clear and coherent politics, with a frankly conservative and anti-democratic character, whose fluctuations in the exposition respond more to a logic of political realism and a sound understanding of contingent scenarios than to a contradiction in absolute terms.

With the Spanish professor Raul Morodo it can thus be asserted that the Pessoan political perspective is animated by some fundamental constants: "Individualism, nationalism, anti-Catholicism"; on the other hand «his magical and nostalgic monarchism (government of one only) will make him identify with military dictatorships, but conservative (socially) and tolerant (religion); and its peculiar New State, an almost pure individualistic system (minimal State), opposed to state divinization and to any partisan coercion ». Ultimately, «Pessoa was a right-wing utopian anarchist».

Pessoa, then, as a theorist of a desirable political model today? This is not so much the intention of our short notes - nor of the Bietti critical edition. The hermeneutical direction proposed here is rather twofold: on the one hand, and this primarily concerns the Pessoani, whether they are scholars or simple enthusiasts, it is aimed at better understanding, without prejudice and with philological rigor, the political position of a giant of twentieth-century culture. , whose work cannot be reduced to mere escapist lyricism, when if anything it is a complex kaleidoscope, within which the poetic gaze is inseparable from the philosophical, political, sociological, economic, esoteric, astrological gaze even; on the other hand, and this interests every careful interpreter of the world around us, it is intended to show how Pessoa's acute observations identify some thematic and methodological nuclei which, opposing certain liberal democratic and politically correct sclerotizations, clarify how dissident thought can be rightly defended with acute and pugnacious arguments. Arguments that, read after a century, continue to exert an attractive magnetism, revealing a narrative other e further with respect to paradigms mainstream.

A few examples? The importance of tradition, given that "The great evil of moderns is [...] that we have moved away from the past without yet having adapted to the future"; the political centrality of the cultural heritage, being that, against Marx, it is the superstructure, here, that determines the structure, and not vice versa; the relevance, connected to it, of the knowledge and understanding of genius loci of a civilization to shape its political role in international scenarios; the possibility - or, better, necessity - of reading political phenomena as religious phenomena, according to a happy intuition that in the twentieth century passed through the most disparate authors, emerging both in the Thought of Tradition and in the debate on political theology:

« In the life of societies there are basically nothing but religious phenomena. The French Revolution was a religious phenomenon. "

With these premises, Pessoa considers the events of Portuguese politics in the difficult twenty years between 1910 and 1935. These are years of transformation: from the Constitutional Monarchy to the Parliamentary Republic, from the "New Republic" of Sidónio Pais tonew state Salazar - who, it should be remembered, aroused the admiration of numerous intellectuals, not least Mircea Eliade.

Over the years, the basic axiom of the political mythopoiesis of Pessoa, which imagines a great, reborn and imperial Portugal, within a Europe founded on four pillars: "Greek Culture, Roman Order, Christian Morality and English Politics"; a Portugal inspired by a pagan, Nietzschean, liberal and individualistic aristocraticism, as a defender of the individual in front of the plebeian masses (in this it is evident the affinity of Pessoa with other great conservatives of the Short Century, such as Borges and Gómez Dávila), inscribed in the eschatological plan of Lusitanian prophecy.

"Let us realize in our soul the advent of Don Sebastiano", Pessoa hopes, referring to Sebastian I of Aviz, monarch protagonist of Portuguese messianism. "Let's do it as it should be done, following in the footsteps of Germany and taking the work further - pagan work, anti-humanitarian work, work of transcendence and elevation through that cruelty to ourselves that the spirit of Nietzsche, in a moment of lucidity, he saw to be the basis of all the sentiment of the empire ».

After all, the Fifth Empire is the real protagonist of Pessoan political prose. With its patterns, its symbolism, its rhythms. Pessoa substitutes the Lusitanian myth "nationalistically" for the Italian myth of Rome:

“We don't need the seven hills of Rome: here too, in Lisbon, we have seven hills. Let us build our Church on these. "

It is the return of the King, of the Veiled, that Pessoa awaits and invokes. This is the real reason for his preference for absolute monarchy: in command there can be only the One - esoteric and spiritual rather than political. It is in the light of this great mythography, which also rises to a much more effective seismography of reality than many bizarre and conceptual modern doctrines, that the Pessoan fragments acquire their full meaning.

« Finally the Veiled is coming. This is the name of Osiris, whose dispersed members - the various religions - will then be rinsed, the Church of Rome extinguished, in the true Catholic Church, in finally universal religion. »

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