On the thing — on if other things haunt it

Abstract

This project investigates the originality of the poetry of Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymous, within modern and contemporary thought. By combining an original experience of immediate reality, an unlearning of modern/metaphysic abstractions, and a language reconciled with things themselves, Caeiro's poetry can help transcend the dichotomies of modern thought, such those opposing subject and object. It can also solve some of the impasses of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, such as the articulation between body and nature, and the passage from a mute perceptual experience to language. Therefore, we consider the Caeirian experience of thing, body, language, and its denial of Reality understood as time and as desire.