Derrida's Distinction between Who and What in Love and Being

I was interested in Derrida's distinction between the "Who" and the "What" in love and Being. Usually, when someone says they are in love without another person - let's call them Jack and Jill - one thinks that Jack loves Jill as Jill (her "self" or her "soul"). However, Derrida argues that there is no self to Jill, because a self would require a center, and the universe is 'decentred.' This is the "Who" that we take for granted; we falsely assume Jill has a static essence.

Obviously, Jill changes physically as she gets older, developing in many different ways, even regenerating completely new cells - physically, Jill is a continuous process of change; even mentally, things are in constant process and Jill is always thinking of different things or in different ways (which contributes to her changing interpretation of herself). But what makes Jill at five years old the same person as Jill at tweny-five? Physically and mentally, Jill is different. She may have memories of her past, but memories are vague interpretations of truth and are unreliable (which becomes a major criticism of the psychoanalytic process, because psychologists were creating memories in their patients mind of events that never happened). So what is it that stays constant? What is it that allows us to say young Jill and old Jill are the same Jill?

The self, of course. But remember, there is no self because there is no center. Jill is "always already" changing in fluid process, meaning that at any given moment she is not a thing, not a "Who." Rather, she is a process of becoming (Sidenote: I would argue that, at one single moment, if time were paused, Jill cannot be in process because process depends on causality, and both process and causality depend on the flow of time. So what is Jill in that frozen moment? She is Jill, technically with a center, yet that center is a "substitution" as Derrida would call it, and will be something different the next moment - maybe not vastly different, but different nonetheless. But in any case, in that frozen moment Jill as Jill, as a "Who," can be interpreted, but it's an inevitably faulty interpretation since it is a fleeting identity).

So how can Jack love Jill as a "Who"? The answer is he doesn't. What Jack is in love with is Jill as "What?" This means that Jack loves what he associates with Jill, not what is part of Jill's essence.

Jack loves Jill's fiery personality. He loves the way she acts towards him, the things she says to him, and how she says them. But all these things are not Jill. Because these things can change. Very often, it is because people change in different directions that their relationships fall apart. If Jill stopped acting compassionatley and lovingly towards Jack, then Jack would see Jill differently, and he would still be in love, but he'd be in love with his idea of what Jill was, not with how he sees Jill now. This is the "What" that Derrida talks about. Jack is in love with the "Whats" that he associates with his conception of Jill's "self." If those "Whats" change drastically enough and for a long enough period of time (which is what happens when people naturally change), Jack will eventually associate these new "Whats," these new personality traits with what he currently considers Jill's self. Thus, he will no longer love Jill (except in his memories, where he keeps alive the conception of what he used to associate with her - and even that is a love of "What" not of "Who").