inventing the present
I think of Julio’s playful poem imagining Che Guevara coming back to life [Ù7], and of the warmth and optimism that runs through so much of his political writing. But still—Che is dead. So is Julio. The literary “Boom” he helped ignite with Hopscotch in 1963 is long over. And the sweeping, world-changing hopes that animated the Latin American Left through the 1960s and early 70s have mostly faded, burned out, or been co-opted.
So it’s fair to ask: is any of this still useful? Are Julio’s political writings now just historical documents—snapshots of one writer’s attempt to live and speak within his time?
Maybe. But I don’t think so. And here’s why.
First, Julio was never fully at home in the political language of his era. He used it because it was what he had, but his most important work kept slipping out from under it. He didn’t settle. He searched, swerved, invented. That makes his voice easier to carry forward, not harder.
Second, what we call his time—those hopeful, chaotic decades of the 60s and 70s—might just be the beginning of our time.
Some thinkers, like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, argue that the changes we’ve seen in the last forty years weren’t just responses to economic forces. They were responses to us. They were reactions to the collective energy of workers, students, artists, everyday people—who, in the 60s and 70s, began demanding more space, more time, more say in shaping their lives. Capital and the state struck back hard. They used dictatorship, deregulation, and the so-called “free market” to flatten those energies. But they didn’t kill them. They just changed the terrain.1
That terrain is where we live now. Neoliberal capitalism has tried to privatize everything, from our health care to our dreams. It tells us we’re individuals, disconnected from each other, responsible for solving our own problems with no safety net. But the desire for collective life—for meaning, play, justice, autonomy—hasn’t gone away. It just keeps popping up in unexpected places.
Julio understood this. His work was never about nostalgia for a utopia to come. It was about creating cracks in the present—little moments where imagination and connection could break through. He believed that change doesn’t come from outside. It begins right here, with the materials we already have. The relationships we’re in. The habits we can shift. The sentences we choose.
He resisted the old split between “revolutionary” and “bourgeois,” between “inside” and “outside” the system. He knew those categories could become traps. Instead, he stayed curious about the movements that mixed things up—movements that didn’t wait for permission, that didn’t rely on purity, that started where they were and got to work reconfiguring life.
That’s also what thinkers like C. L. R. James and the Italian Autonomia movement were doing around the same time. They weren’t trying to seize power in the traditional sense. They were trying to create spaces of autonomy—places where people could act together, outside of command. For them, the revolution wasn’t a destination. It was an ongoing process of becoming more free, more capable, more alive.2
Julio called this invention. He used that word over and over. Not escape. Not revolution. Not resistance. Invention. Not because he thought we could make something out of nothing—but because we can always rearrange what we already have. We can always move toward a life that’s more open, more interconnected, more playful, more ours.
To me, this is still a useful practice. Maybe even an urgent one. We don’t need to believe in the old utopias to start living differently now. We can loosen the hold of identities and roles that don’t fit. We can say no to language that divides or reduces us. We can invent how we live, together, in the middle of all this mess.
If there’s power here, it’s not the power of command. It’s not about taking over. It’s about creating. What Negri calls constituent power—the power to shape and reshape life from the inside out. It’s messy. It doesn’t always look like politics. But it’s what Julio was doing when he wrote, when he played, when he paid attention to the world.3
In that spirit, we can say: we’re more than workers, more than artists, more than citizens, more than dissidents, more than consumers, more than exhausted. We are more than any name that power tries to give us.4
And maybe that’s how we invent the present.
1 I am thinking of that view they elaborate in their books Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004).
2 See Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Harry Cleaver, Reading ‘Capital’ Politically (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 51-66; Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano, Ed. John Fleming (Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), pp. 19-30; and, finally, Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
3 Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, Trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xiii.
4 In a 1965 letter Cortázar wrote the following of Charlie Parker and Che Guevara, both of whom had inspired stories, “Catalysts, symbols of great powers, of marvelous moments of humankind. The poet, the storyteller, chooses them without asking their permission; they belong already to everyone, because for a moment they have overcome the mere condition of the individual.” Julio Cortázar, “A Roberto Fernández Retamar,” July 3, 1965, Cartas 2: 1964-1968, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), p. 899.