It seemed to him that the heart had its metaphysics distinct from that of the mind. An immediacy of feeling-with presumed the irreducible difference between agents each of whom was an embodiment of optionality, and at the same time a non-optionality that was prior to every apparently wilful determination - and possibly even its target. Reduction was not a relevant category in this play, there could be no question of reducing the other to ourself, or of simplifying our relations. There is never a question of transforming the other, but of swaying them, at most of coercing them, or playing them into some sort of impasse. We would like to be a solipsist but are unable to; in spite of all our efforts we believe in others, and hope in them. The other first appears in specific identities, those myth figures, the mother, the father, brother, sister, dog, cat, and then as variants defined through selective negations. In the ontology of others we have a logic of positive entities in which both negation and representation have their full force. It is constitutive that this person does not belong to the family, or that W is not known to X, or that Y represents Z. It is knowing and not knowing that links people, but even more so actions and rules or permissions for actions. The units of relationship becoming more complex, bringing forth obligations and expectations, the need for continual reinterpretation. But relationship is not the heart, being perhaps no more than what elicits it in intermittent and inconsistent ways, enchants it for a time or provokes its opposition or its rage for destruction. And when the heart chooses to speak why does it always sound so alone?