ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt in her 'Introduction' to Benjamin's Illuminations reflects on fame and its many modalities, judging posthumous fame to be the 'rarer and least desired' though 'often more solid than the other sorts'. The Book of Disquiet is a profoundly visual book in which images succeed each other, annul and cancel each other, and get piled up, to the delight and consternation of the reader, as if Soares were executing Nietzsche's view of truth as an army of moving metaphors, only too aware of their tendency to become ossified and forgotten. One could take a lesson from the film and avoid trying to fix the text's meaning, preferring instead to rely on a personal, individual, always subjective and ever-changing view of its main aspects. Take the notion of disquiet, for instance. Critics usually do not tire of stressing the fact that Pessoa, after his return to Portugal from South Africa, apparently never left the country.
