Derrida: rumination on love
Over the abstract concept of love, Derrida meditates whether love is a matter of loving someone, or loving something in someone.
"Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? -- I love you because you are you... or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence? -- The difference between the who and the what, at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is? Often love starts with some type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or that. Inversely, love is disapointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn't merit our love. The other person isn't like this or like that. So at the teath of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are, but because they are such and such. That is to say, at the history of love, the heart of love is divided between the who and the what."
In other words, when love begins and ends, it is an issue of things that make someone up which birth or murder it. But when in the middle of being in love, how often don't we hear that love is a matter of loving "who you are." These two seem to work against each other -- or at least undo something about the way we think of love. If I love someone for "who they are", how do I know what that is? Can you serve me a bottle of "who you are", please? I'd like to take a whiff and measure whether I like it or not...
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