Pessoa’s Novel Invention

Fernando Pessoa’s invention of the heteronym represents a singular moment in the history of subjectivity. Heteronymy is, as the name implies, an othering of oneself, an awareness of oneself but as other. The contrast with the pseudonym is deliberate: a pseudonym is a mask, a disguise intended, even if only ironically, to hide the true identity of the author. A heteronym is something else entirely: it is the author writing ‘outside his own person’ and in doing so transforming himself into an other I. A heteronym possesses agency, if only in the capacity to compose verse, and has its own expressive and experiential style. If transforming oneself in simulation into an other I is the core of the idea of heteronymic subjectivity, an equally important theme in Pessoa is that of depersonalization. Living through a heteronym, which from one point of view must certainly constitute an enrichment of experiential life, is paradoxically described in terms of a loss of self. Two distinct kinds of self-awareness are co-present in any act of heteronymic simulation: a heteronymic self-awareness which consists in an awareness of oneself as another I, living through a distinctive set of experiences, emotions, and moods; and what I will call a forumnal self-awareness, an awareness of oneself as hosting the heteronym, which is at the same time a place from which one’s experiential life qua heteronym can be observed and analysed.

Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences: Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History

Emotion and feeling have only in the last decade become analytic concepts in the humanities, reflected in what some have called an “affective turn” in the academy at large. The study of emotion has also found a place in science studies and the history and philosophy of science, accompanied by the recognition that even the history of objectivity depends in a dialectical fashion on a history of subjectivity (Daston and Galison 2010, esp. chap. 4). This topical issue is a contribution to this larger trend across the humanities and the history of science, and yet is circumscribed by attention to a particular kind of emotion or condition for feeling: one centered not in an individual body, but in the interstices between bodies and things, between selves and others – what we call empathy.

“The Road into the Open”: From Narrative Closure to the Endless Performance of Subjectivity in Mahler and Freud at the Turn of the Century

This article studies selected works of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud as enacting the history of subjectivity as a problematic narrative of the deconstruction and construction of identity. It views Mahler and Freud's cultural productions as historically parallel examples of a certain way of imagining human subjectivity as a reflective activity. It studies their ideas on identity as a form of assimilation, and looks at how their “works” took a turn towards subjectivity. The article shows that Freud, Mahler, and their modernist contemporaries did not opt to live in their songs and selves, but instead found a new way to imagine the relations among individuals.

Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: Contribution to a History of Subjectivity

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