Cortázar and the swing

The present article investigates the concept of rhythm or swing that mobilizes Julio Cortázar’s narrative from a speculative approach akin to a “theory of assemblages,” a philosophy of multiplicities inspired by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and systematized over the past decade by the Mexican philosopher Manuel DeLanda. The article unfolds the notion of swing beyond the parameters of Cortázar’s own thinking, and reformulates it as a “self-execution” of the work itself through the style which characterizes it. It concludes that the swing which Cortázar alludes to is nothing more than the “necessary contingency” of things: the perpetual state of opening of a given work and the real force animating a truly free creation