Soul is experienced only as absence, in the creatureliness of the other.

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Soul dawns on love only in its absence’ and ‘soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption’ — the human is located precisely at the creaturely, the sub-human; this resists any one-sentence gloss and rewards decades of return.
• XREF: The creaturely eyes ‘remote from reflection’ — connects to Levinas’s face of the other and to the earlier soundscape work on the pre-reflective as what registers as most human. — connects to: Desire is drawn to the soulless as a cipher of living spirit.; Absence is not given by objects but posited by a consciousness that negates; Selfness arises when the possible I am is reflected as absent-presence (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Absence is not given by objects but posited by a consciousness that negates #contradicts (0.75)
• Selfness arises when the possible I am is reflected as absent-presence #expands (0.75)
• The noetic soul is paradoxically both impassible and receptive to form #complicates (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 411