Love brings an end to the opposition between gift and property without surmounting and without sublating it: if i return to myself within love, I do not return to myself from love (the dialectic, on the contrary, feeds on the equivocation). I do not return from it, and consequently, something of I is definitely lost or dissociated in its act of loving. That is undoubtedly why I return (if at least it is the image of a return that is appropriate here), but I return broken : I come back to myself, or I come out of it, broken. The “return” does not annul the break; it neither repairs it nor sublates it, for the return in fact takes place only across the break itself, keeping it open. Love re-presents I to itself broken (and this is not a representation). It presents this to it: he, this subject, was touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from now on, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or fractured, even if only slightly. He is, which is to say that the break or the wound is not an accident, and neither is it a property that the subject could relate to himself. For the break is a break in his self-possession as a subject: it is, essentially, an interruption of the process of relating oneself to oneself outside of oneself. From then on, I is constituted broken. As soon as there is love, the slightest act of love, the slightest spark, there is this ontological fissure that cuts across and that disconnects the elements of the subject-proper, the fibers of its heart. One hour of love is enough, one kiss alone, provided that it is out of love - and can there, in truth, be any other kind? Can one do it without love, without being broken into, even if only slightly? 

Jean-Luc Nancy: Shattered Love