Engineering alterities: the organic and the machinic in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic creation

This article seeks to analyze Fernando Pessoa’s process of heteronymic construction from two fronts that are simultaneously opposite from and complementary to each other: the organic and the machinic. Thinking from and through these fronts, we can understand both Pessoa’s epistolary narratives and his poems as “himself”, as well as the poetic production of his main heteronyms, as microcosmos of a poetic process of creating alterities that goes beyond the 19th-century symbolist influence and opens paths to new possible readings of the author as a key part of 20th-century global modernism