[L]ove is always also about the eventual disappearance of the loved one. In this regard, presence and absence are not contradictory, but instead allow for one another to take place. To love is not to possess because what love grasps is always fleeting: in a sense, it is the fleeting itself. This is why in regard to Stolorow’s observation, one must add that existence is not constituted by the loss of something in particular, but by loss as such: a primordial loss, without anything lost in the first place. Here, we may begin to understand how love has to do with existence as the experience of properly grasping the impropriety of someone else’s existence. In Haneke’s film this experience is given as the appropriation of the ultimate inappropriable: death.
This may be another way of thinking about what the experience of the “exappropriation” in the work of Jacques Derrida. It also open an atypical path towards the interpretation of the concept of Ereignis in the work of Martin Heidegger. In On Time and Being, Heidegger states “Expropriation [Enteignis] belongs to Appropriation [Ereignis] as such.”. Giorgio Agamben explored this path in his essay on “The Passion of Facticity” where he argues that “the problem of love, as passion, shows its proximity to that of the Ereignis”.
