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Inventing Autonomies: Meditations on Julio Cortazar and the Politics of Our Time

“Our possible truth must be INVENTION” (Cortázar 1966, 384). So declares the narrator near one of the possible beginnings of Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch. In this essay I will argue, essentially, that our possible truth, today, must be invention as well. Or, at least, that in reexamining Cortázar’s notion of invention we would add a valuable tool to those we already have with which to think the possibilities of transformation in our time. In the pages that follow, I will develop this argument by first, elaborating Cortázar’s notion of “invention,” especially as it functions in a few of his literary works; second, examining its operation in his own political discourse; and finally, reflecting a bit on how the notion and practice of invention might engage not only the politics of our time, but some of the other conceptual tools we have to think about that politics.