Can the New Man Speak? by Bruno Bosteels

Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. - Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Sometimes even a typographical error can put us on the tracks of a significant conceptual debate. Thus, in a recent sequence-by-sequence analysis of Memorias del subdesarrollo in which we can already find a fine summary of Dialéctica del espectador, the author of the book Moral burguesa y revolución at one point is wrongly quoted as "Leo Rozitchner. "24 Rozitchner's actual first name, though, is not even León, which is but the common Hispanized version of Leib. From Leib to León to Leo, we are thus led to ask the thorny question of whether the creation of a "new man" necessarily also implies the obliteration of the "old man" as Jewish. Or, to put this question the other way around: To what extent is the construction of a militant subjectivity, or of a new socialist or communist humanity, a process that would be constitutively Christian, if not also anti-Semitic, modeled upon examples such as Saint Paul's or Saint Augustine's? Do these examples always necessarily carry with them the burden of having to destroy the old subject within oneself? "The nub of the problem was to reject my own will and to desire yours," as Augustine writes to God in his Confessions. "But it was in my inmost heart, where I had grown angry with myself, where I had been stung with remorse, where I had slain my old self and offered it in sacrifice. "25 Is this problem-common to Marxism and Christianity-of the transition between the old and the new man, or between the old and the new society, necessarily a violent process of rebirth through self-sacrifice, as the religious model of the conversion seems to suggest? More generally, can religion play an emancipatory role in politics, for instance, through the example of liberation theology? Or, as Marx would seem to suggest in "On the Jewish Question," does genuinely human, as opposed to merely political, emancipation require a purely earthly perspective, and thus the extirpation of all religious remnants, whether Jewish, Christian, or otherwise, as old (particularist) impediments to the new (generic) humanity? Finally, would not Freud seem to confirm this secular perspective insofar as, in Civilization and Its Discontents, for example, he classifies religion, with its oceanic feeling of fusion with the universe, as a collective neurosis-one that, according to Freud in The Future of Illusion, humanity will be able to overcome through the progress of science?