ABSTRACT
The Argentine, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the state…. One thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms like Hegel’s ‘The State is the reality of the moral idea’ strike him as sinister jokes. Films made in Hollywood often hold up for admiration the case of a man (usually a journalist) who seeks out the friendship of a criminal in order to hand him over to the police; the Argentine, for whom friendship is a passion and the police a mafia, feels that this ‘hero’ is an incomprehensible swine.
