Can the New Man Speak? by Bruno Bosteels

Creating a new humanity always comes down to demanding that the old one be destroyed. A violent, unreconciled debate rages about the nature of this old humanity. - Alain Badiou, The Century

A similar conclusion, but this time with even broader implications for a critical history of the present moment, can be drawn from Rozitchner's book Moral burguesa y revolución, published in 1963 with the dedication "A mis compañeros de Contorno," the latter being the important Argentine journal in which the author worked alongside David and Ismael Viñas, Oscar Masotta, Juan José Sebreli, and others. This book, Rozitchner's second after his doctoral thesis Persona y comunidad (Person and Community), offers a close textual analysis and theoretical commentary on the transcripts from the hearings of the counterrevolutionaries taken prisoners after their failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in 1962 in Playa Girón during the battle of the "Bay of Pigs. " As I have mentioned, Sergio reads long parts of this book in voice-overs combined with documentary footage from the hearings and surrounding events. Based on the transcribed testimonies of the counterrevolutionaries themselves, this analysis tries to come to grips with what the same author in a later work would call "the limits of bourgeois individualism. "20 In fact, the book begins with the following line: "The goal of the present work is to confront the moral conceptions of the bourgeoisie and the ethics of Revolution. "21 Such would be the stark either/or choice: Bourgeois morality or revolutionary ethics? In Gutiérrez Alea's movie, however, we catch barely a glimpse of the ethics of the revolution. Instead, through the overpowering perspective of Sergio, what we witness is an impressive montage of the sarcasms, witticisms, and neurotic reflections, both accusatory and self-deprecating, of a supreme exemplar of bourgeois morality.