Fernando Beleza APSA 2016 Stanford University Pessoa and the Death Drive: Decadence, Heteronomy, and the Making of Modernism “Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence,” writes Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner. In fact, the problem of decadence—a certain idea of the end of times, individual and social degeneration, and decay of culture and the arts— remained a recurrent concern in Nietzsche’s thought from his early works, such as the Birth of the Tragedy, to his very last writings. In The Case of Wagner, he assures the reader that he resists decadence through what he calls a “special discipline.” I will not be discussing Nietzsche’s “special discipline” here today. I ask you, however, to keep this in mind as I turn my attention to Fernando Pessoa’s unique relationship with the “problem of decadence” and the striking manner in which he echoes Nietzsche’s words decades later, adding his own name to the myriad of modern artists and intellectuals for whom decadence emerged as a major concern. In a letter to José Osório de Oliveira, dated 1932, he divides his formative years into three parts. The first was his infancy and first adolescence, which he spent in Victorian South Africa. Pessoa credits Dickens as a major influence in this stage of his life. Milton and Shakespeare shaped the second period. As for the third part of his formative years, Pessoa writes: No que posso chamar a minha Terceira adolescência, passada aqui em Lisboa, vivi na atmosfera dos filósofos gregos e alemães, assim como na dos decadentes franceses, cuja acção me foi subitamente varrida do espírito pela