“The Old is dying and the New cannot be born”: reflections on left-wing intellectuality in Latin America

Abstract

This article examines the impasses faced by the contemporary left through the theoretical perspectives of Vladimir Safatle and Antonio Gramsci, integrating these contributions with the intellectual trajectory of Julio Cortázar. It begins from the premise that the current crisis is symbolic and epistemological, characterized by the exhaustion of traditional categories for interpreting reality and by stagnation in political imagination. Within this scenario of interregnum, as described by Gramsci, the intellectual assumes a central role as an agent in the struggle for a new cultural hegemony. Julio Cortázar is analyzed as an exemplary figure of such engagement, combining aesthetic freedom with political commitment, rejecting both elitist neutrality and dogmatic imperatives. His work signals the possibility of critical and transformative art, resistant to instrumentalization and capable of reactivating literature’s symbolic potential as a means to reinvent the present.