The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

All language is but a poor translation.

1.  

   Human beings look at you. – The outrage over atrocities decreases, the more that the ones affected are unlike normal readers, the more brunette, “dirty,” dago-like. This says just as much about the atrocity as about the observers. Perhaps the social schematism of perception in anti-Semites is so altered, that they cannot even see Jews as human beings. The ceaselessly recurrent expression that savages, blacks, Japanese resemble animals, or something like apes, already contains the key to the pogrom. The possibility of this latter is contained in the moment that a mortally wounded animal looks at a human being in the eye. The defiance with which they push away this gaze – “it’s after all only an animal” – is repeated irresistibly in atrocities to human beings, in which the perpetrators must constantly reconfirm this “only an animal,” because they never entirely believed it even with animals. The concept of human beings in repressive society is the parody of the notion that human beings were created in the image of God. The mechanism of “pathic projection” functions in such a manner that the power-brokers perceive only their own mirror image as human beings, instead of reflecting back what is human as precisely what is different. Murder is thus the attempt to displace, again and again, the madness of such false perception into reason, through greater madness: what is not seen as a human being and yet is a human being, is turned into a thing, so that it can no longer rebut the manic gaze through any sort of impulse.

   – Theodor W. Adorno.  Minima Moralia, 68. (via plzpityshatov)

   (via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)

   Source: plzpityshatov

   • 37
   • Link
   • queue
2. 1. eva-nadie likes this
   2. cathinone likes this
   3. eibmorb likes this
   4. varys likes this
   5. apofis likes this
   6. zealotry likes this
   7. teotihuacan reblogged this from grandejouissance
   8. someinspiredtitle likes this
   9. contrasol likes this
   10. fourwindsshotgun likes this
   11. teotihuacan likes this
   12. facelessbitchmage likes this
   13. eveyinbrunette likes this
   14. grandejouissance reblogged this from goethes-fist
   15. grandejouissance likes this
   16. getradified likes this
   17. apoetreflects likes this
   18. mrhagan likes this
   19. iwriteyourname likes this
   20. charopus likes this
   21. indielowercase likes this
   22. afronaut reblogged this from plzpityshatov
   23. plzpityshatov posted this
3. blog comments powered by Disqus