Adorno on Projection

Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, ‘dirty,’ dago-like… In repressive society the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of ‘pathic projection’ determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different. Murder is thus the repeated attempt, by yet greater madness, to distort the madness of such false perception into reason: what was not seen as human and yet is human, is made a thing, so that its stirrings can no longer refute the manic gaze.

Theodor Adorno, Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Minima Moralia , “People are looking at you” (1945)

~ by Mia Chen on September 20, 2008.