Intimate Microspheres in Fernando Pessoa and Other Refugees from History: Notes on the Topology of Symbolic Space and Extracultural Condition
Intimate Microspheres in Fernando Pessoa and Other Refugees from History: Notes on the Topology of Symbolic Space and Extracultural Condition

Summary/Abstract: The essay deals with the poetic creation of intimate space bubbles, as if isolated from the rest of the world reducible to a map dominated by History and the imperial mechanism as its driving force. The text in focus is Antinous by Fernando Pessoa, where such a microsphere of affect is built around a homoerotic relationship. The case of the poet living in the times of the advent of Portuguese fascism is put in the context of several East-European refugees from History striving to reconstruct their lost intimacies in the margin of the hegemonies that ousted them from their own countries (Cioran, Eliade, Miłosz). I claim that the subject constructing his intimate topology transgresses the limitations of his cultural inscription, that appears as disgracefully locatable, hemmed in History; he adopts an extracultural stance. The refugees from History, losing their language and the immediate contact with their national cultures, strive to communicate with a larger, universal dimension. In a way, such private, extracultural topologies run parallel to the imperial claim of universalism. Yet the microsphere of affect communicating with the universalist macrosphere introduces a qualitative difference, as it is built upon the authenticity of loss and longing, rather than drive for hegemony and control.

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