Políticas e subjetividades do não humano em julio cortázar

Abstract

The present study investigates the animal imminence in the literary universe of the renowned Latin American writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), based on the reading of the short story Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, in parallel with other texts such as Headache, Distant, Bestiary, and Circe – all published in 1951 in the compilation of short narratives titled "Bestiary." Grounded in the unsettling thoughts of Donna Haraway, Gabriel Giorggi, Giorgio Agamben, John Berger, Vinciane Despret, among other contemporary intellectuals, the aim was to unravel how the feverish presence of animals drags Cortázar's characters into the abyss of the unreal, stripping them of the status of the human, once granted by the "anthropological machine of humanism" (Agamben, 2007, p. 51), according to anthropocentric criteria, considering race, ethnicity, sexuality, language, rationality, and genetic integrity. Having made this recognition, the study sought to verify in Cortázar's text how the characters, placed in adverse contexts, are invaded by a deterritorializing animal contiguity that questions the power technologies over life and reflects on how fluid the boundaries between humans and non-humans are, constantly altered by the state's imaginary, responsible for separating the bodies to protect from those to abandon. Thus, it was possible to observe the emergence of new politics of living and new ethics of dying in the construction of an ontology of the body, undertaken through the animal sign, formatted as an organic, affective, and material continuum of man.