27

Literature provides us with the most striking illustrations of love as a passionate quest for that other being: in her love for Abelard, Heloise is the exemplary heroine of this quest, divesting herself of all possessions to seek the purity of the absolute being. This conception of love is also found outside the Western world in the Japan of the samurai, where, as Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel shows, the quest for love is closely entwined with the ontological quest. These wanderings bring the heroes closer together while also unavoidably pulling them apart, outlining a fundamental illusion: meeting the Other on the field of being (which presupposes that the subject abandons any claim to exist for themselves) means that one’s own void can be ignored by repressing the Other’s, which is supposed to be fulfilled by love-as-passion.