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Rebecca Rae Garonzik
In the studies that have been written about Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel (1973), most scholars attribute the presence of the erotic in the novel, as well as its theoretical elaboration, directly to the writings of Herbert Marcuse and the political culture of the New Left. By looking only to Marcuse to delineate the theoretical basis of the erotic within this text, scholars have tended to overlook the degree of cultural exchange that occurred between the New Left and the leftist political culture in Latin America, as well as the pre-existing parallels between Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Ernesto Che Guevara’s El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965). While not making use of the terms ‘eros’ or ‘the erotic,’ Guevara’s essay delves into the relationship between politics and affect in a way that mirrors the relationship between the political and the erotic in Marcuse’s political philosophy and that closely resonates with Cortázar’s use of the erotic in Libro de Manuel. In order to fully understand the significance of the erotic in Cortázar’s novel one has to consider both the ideas presented in Guevara’s essay as well as those appearing in Marcuse’s text, and the way that these related yet variant concepts came together in the political cultures of the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, such an understanding of the theoretical complexity of the erotic in Cortázar’s text opens the door to a fuller understanding of the role of the revolutionary erotic in the Latin American political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and its distinctive presence in the socially committed literature of that period
