Different generations of critics have examined the feeling of decadence in Fernando Pessoa’s work. This article begins with a discussion of existing scholarship on the topic, with special relevance given to Haquira Osakabe’s book: Fernando Pessoa: resposta à decadência [Fernando Pessoa: Response to Decadence]. It offers a reconsideration of Osakabe’s contribution and reframes Pessoa’s heteronymic project in the context of what Vincent Sherry has recently described as the modernist reinvention of decadence. More precisely, this article aligns relevant aspects of the performative dimension of Pessoa’s ‘drama-in-people’ with Freud’s thinking and response to the sensibility of decadence in his theorization on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
