How can I touch you if you are not there
I love you: I don’t quite know who, or what. ‘I love’ flows away, is buried, drowned, burned, lost in a void. We’ll have to wait for the return of ‘I love.’ Perhaps a long time, perhaps forever. Where has ‘I love’ gone? What has become of me? ‘I love’ lies in wait for the other. Has he swallowed me up? Spat me out? Taken me? Left me? Locked me up? Thrown me out? What’s he like now? No longer (like) me? When he tells me ‘I love you,’ is he giving me back? Or is he giving himself in that form? His? Mine? The same? Another? But then where am I, what have I become?
When you say I love you‚ - staying right here, close to you, close to me‚ - you’re saying I love myself. You don’t need to wait for it to be given back; neither do I. We don’t owe each other anything. That ‘I love you’ is neither gift nor debt. You ‘give’ me nothing when you touch yourself, touch me, when you touch yourself again through me. You don’t give yourself. What would I do with you, with myself, wrapped up like a gift? You keep our selves to the extent that you share us. You find our selves to the extent that you trust us. Alternatives, oppositions, choices, bargains like these have no business between us. Unless we restage their commerce, and remain within their order. Where ‘we’ has no place.
- Luce Irigaray; ‘When our lips speaks together’
![Things are, and human beings, gifts, and sacrifices are, animals and plants are, equipments and works are.
- Heideger
crashinglybeautiful:liquidnight:Hengki Koentjoro [via Fantomatik]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kyqdusEHrW1qzhl9eo1_500.jpg)
