It is not always easy to make sense of love, as absurd as it seems, as resistant against every meaning. One is based on a rift, which Jacques Derrida describes as the difference between the who (qui) and what (quoi) of love: “Is love the love of someone or the love of some thing? […] 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? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? 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 kind of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed 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 death of love, it appears that one stops loving one another not because of who they are, but because they are such and such. That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love is divided between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’. The question of ‘Being’, to return to philosophy – because the first question of philosophy is: What is it ‘to Be’? What is Being? The question of Being is itself always already divided between the ‘who’ and ‘what’. Is ‘Being’ someone or some thing? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving is caught between this division of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’.” The subject fluctuates between the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of love, and yet it only loves if it is ready to lose sight of the ‘what’ in order to affirm the ‘who’ which is equal to the invisibility of the loved one. Love makes you blind, because the subject gazes past its properties towards its lack of properties: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame) but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.” Blindness does not belong to love because the loving subject misconceives of the properties of the loved one, but because it addresses the other in its invisibility, which could also be called its real or its truth. It is said that love means to understand the other, to have sympathy for the other. What if the misunderstanding of love lay exactly here, in this conjunction of love, sympathy and understanding? “Understanding the other”, Slavoj Žižek says, “means pacifying him/her, preventing that the encounter with the other turns into an encounter with the real, which undermines one’s own position.” Žižek is right when he dissociates the relation to the other–no matter whether friendship, love or neutral relationship–from the ideology of empathy and understanding. Understanding presumes that there is something to understand. Empathy presumes the “richness of my inner life” or of the other’s, and the ideology-critical lesson of psychoanalysis lies in breaking with the “imaginary narcissism” and its religion of inwardness in order to open up the view on the emptiness in the subject. Instead of hiding in some sort of inside, in the stories which it tells itself and others about itself – report about its past, its culture and childhood, its fears and hopes -, the subject’s truth lies “rather outside, in what we do”. The true relation to the other implies a blindness which represents an opening beyond that which I understand and know of it. In the language of existential criticism: more than towards its thrownness (ecstasy of the past) and its Being-at (ecstasy of the present), the (loving) subject turns towards the other as existence (as unfinished draft, ecstasy of the future), that is, in our terminology, as an indefinite subject.