Selfhood; Eilidh and Fernando Pessoa

Abstract

Eilidh dialogues with Pessoa about the question of the self as plural and relational. She questions the self as a singular entity through her generative play, her tireless masking, the way in which she goes in and out of costumes, roles and identities. Pessoa does so through his heteronyms, by moving in and out of characters—persons that he crafts—who have different names, features and lives and exist alongside each other. Why is it not enough for Eilidh to rest in her self? Why does she decide instead to try out different clothes, costumes, characters, roles occupying other spaces, selves and times? Heideggerian existentialism reads in curiosity traces of fallen-ness into the world. Far from home, the world is a place we long to belong to as we engage in a ceaseless self-search by means of our very being in it. Or is our very being-in-the-world a ceaseless search for the self? Psychoanalysis helps to think about this question relationally with its attention to the mother-infant relationship as that first self-other relationship that allows a sense of self by means of an other. Winnicott would add to that the thought of a sense of self emerging not only by being mirrored but also by not being found or else by being failed by the other. Thinking of Eilidh, what in her drew me readily in, I think of how the reciprocal use of each other (I looked to find Eilidh who kept on changing) was also an escape from each other, confirming also of the fluidity in being and in meaning as they escape being captured.