Desire is drawn to the soulless as a cipher of living spirit.

Evidence

The soullessness of those in the margins of civilization, forbidden self-determination by daily need, at once appealing and tormenting, becomes a phantasm of soul to the well-provided-for, whom civilization has taught to be ashamed of the soul. Love falls for the soulless as a cipher of living spirit, because the living are the theatre of its desperate desire to save, which can exercise itself only on the lost: soul dawns on love only in its absence. So the expression called human is precisely that of the eyes closest to those of the animal, the creaturely ones, remote from the reflection of the self. At the last, soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 181 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Desire singles out undifferentiated, nearly motionless flesh as the image of pure facticity; Soul is experienced only as absence, in the creatureliness of the other. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 181

Broader Connections

• Desire singles out undifferentiated, nearly motionless flesh as the image of pure facticity #expands (0.86)
• Soul is experienced only as absence, in the creatureliness of the other. #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 181