The ego is a late product of projection, not a primordial given.
Evidence
In order to reflect the thing as it is, the subject must return to it more than he receives from it. The subject creates the world outside himself from the traces which it leaves in his senses: the unity of the thing in its manifold characteristics and states; and he therefore constitutes the “I” retrospectively by learning to grant a synthetic unity not only to the external impressions, but to the internal impressions which gradually separate off from them. The real ego is the most recent constant product of projection. In a process which could only be completed historically with the developed powers of the human physiological constitution, it developed as a unified and at the same time eccentric function. Even as an independently objectified ego, it is only equivalent to the significance of the world of objects for it. The inner depth of the subject consists in nothing other than the delicacy and wealth of the external world of perceptions. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 149
Categorization
- DEFINE: Projection is being defined here as the constitutive act by which the subject builds both the world and its own ego — central to the chapter’s mechanism of anti-Semitism.
- XREF: Connects to Freud’s ego formation and to the chapter’s core thesis that anti-Semitism is a pathological projection. — connects to: The Ego exists as an object of pre-reflective consciousness, not as a repudiated entity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 82; The Kantian ego is a product of material economic conditions, not a transcendental given — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 79; The human is a historical point of arrival, not a given starting point. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1268 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- The human is a historical point of arrival, not a given starting point.
#expands(0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1268