Cortázar y la técnica: Continuidades y discontinuidades en la autopista del sur

Abstract

This work of anthropological poetics proposes a speculative approach to the celebrated tale by Julio Cortázar, “The Southern Thruway”, aiming to articulate an effective interdisciplinary connection that posits the Argentine writer as an early critic of late modernity’s technological rationality. The analysis focuses on the cortazarian figure of the “centipede” –that human-machine hybrid which emerges from the traffic jam as a kind of semi-autonomous assemblage– and explores its functioning as an ontological metaphor for the literary understanding of the technological phenomenon. Through a dialogue with the philosophies of Andrew Feenberg, Martin Heidegger, and other philosophers, we discover, in the texture of the narrative, a cortazarian conception of technics that equally transcends technophobic pessimism and technophilic fascination, foreshadowing a critical theory of technology in line with Feenberg’s philosophy.