These days, people everywhere are calling for a type of politics that places ethical requirements at its centre. It is time to question this stitching together of ethics and politics and the misunderstandings and consequences of this claim for the concept of politics. The response to this challenge comes, on the one hand, from Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher well-known for her books on Heidegger and the Jews (from the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks) and on the ‘philosophy of migration’, and, on the other, from Bruno Peixe Dias, a doctoral student in the area of political philosophy.

The writer recounts the experience of youth in a place that, in his view, is ‘Lisbon’s last suburb’. It is told in the first person and filtered through eyes that have meanwhile acquired the language and analytical tools needed to understand the hatred and cruel laws of a world – ours – full of borders and demarcated territories. It is of paradigmatic value here.
 

Grotesque power, one of the long-standing declensions of political power, has triumphantly re-emerged in our time in the form of figures who act like buffoons, clowns and jesters. This is what writer and journalist Christian Salmon, contributor to some of the most prestigious international newspapers and author of a vast and original body of work on our contemporaneity, discusses in this essay.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architecture as material evidence, leading independent investigations and partnering with international prosecutors and environmental and human rights groups to find, reconstruct, and expose violence. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Weizman discusses a decade of working across the boundaries between art and forensic analysis, journalism and the law, with advanced spatial and media investigations into key cases of state and corporate violence around the world.

In today’s all-pervasive communications society, with its arsenal of technological tools, fame is a conspicuous object of desire, an aspiration that requires no exceptional acts or achievements because universal recognition has become an end in itself. Famous people, celebrities and stars form a vast constellation of people who achieve fame – real social actors who sweep into our world before vanishing as quickly as they appeared. The rules and factors governing fame and celebrity throughout history have been determined by the structure of the public space and by the codes and techniques of socialisation. Thus TV, with all its power to create and disseminate images, initiated a new era in the history of fame that is still ongoing, despite strong competition from the Internet and social media that have introduced new rules into the way the frequency of dissemination constructs fame. Prestige, recognition and authority – factors that once shared a common space with fame – are no longer so relevant, being subject to forms of legitimation that have lost much of their importance.

Formulating the law that determines the fame of ‘stars’ in the society of the spectacle, the Italian philosopher Mario Pezzella discusses the seductive staging and affirmative form of appearance that is distinctive to them and which produces a system of desire and a compelling form of voluntary bondage, while at the same time reactivating mythical archetypes.

Unexceptional words are the best specimens for observation. They go unnoticed until you stare at them long enough to realize their endless ramifications. The word feedback is a case in point.

Being the product of a laid-back environment created by musicians and sound engineers, feedback has never had the smug undertones of other imported words that crumple the fabric of the Portuguese language. Lacking a quality that would secure it a place in the circles of cosmopolitan jargon, feedback originally became a commonplace word conveying a specific, unpleasant noise. 

A verse from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, if regarded autonomously, would appear to be a proposition that could have been taken from a philosophical work or a reflection that takes on the form of an aphorism that produces false evidence. Here, poet and professor of Literature Amândio Reis comments on the verse quoted above.

This chronicle by Fernando Pessoa about celebrity is both a philosophical meditation and a code of ethics. In his essay, whose title Vanitas is taken from Ecclesiastes, the poet Manuel de Freitas uses Pessoa’s text to make a claim about our age: ‘We live in a time when celebrity is almost invariably based on aesthetic misconceptions or crass promotional campaigns.’ ‘As for myself,’ he asserts, ‘now that I am a bit older than Fernando Pessoa, I am quite happy with the one or two hundred readers that closely follow my every book.’

The writer, translator, critic and researcher Richard Zenith was born in the USA and has lived in Portugal for more than three decades. His exhaustive work on the writings of Fernando Pessoa has made him one of the world’s leading authorities on the great poet of heteronyms.

When he won the Pessoa Prize in 2012, Zenith said, ‘The most complicated part about writing a biography of Fernando Pessoa is finding a narrative thread. The essence of his life doesn’t consist of facts or events. It’s hard to write about a life that was spent above all in his head. Pessoa lived between this world and the next.’

The biography that Zenith has written is due for publication later this year. His work draws on long years of study dedicated to the legacy of this poetic genius, and on everything that he has discovered about him. As a book both about Pessoa and by Zenith, this monumental biography is eagerly awaited.

The pre-publication chapter presented in this issue of Electra anticipates and reveals the nature of Pessoa: A Biography. It combines meticulous sources with a knowledgeably subtle interpretation to create a narrative with a strong, fluid and fascinating thread that echoes the poet’s multiple voices and captures the movements of this magnificent machine of melancholy created by the person who once asked: ‘Why did I make my only life / A life made only of dreams?’

The pages here present a synthetic image of Pessoa: his physical appearance (‘the always well-dressed poet’), sources of income, family ties, social, intellectual and literary bonds, the clear enigma of his sexuality, the real and mythical Lisbon, and the complex relationship between his life and work.

Almost a decade ago, Zenith said of the future: ‘Only after finishing the biography of Pessoa, if it doesn’t finish with me first…’

The biography was eventually written, and its writer has survived. This triumph over death is also a victory for Fernando Pessoa. The poet lives on and will continue to do so; his life deserves to be told with inspiration, rigour and care, and this is precisely what Richard Zenith has done.