'Writing' (a readable entity) must, in virtue of its essential detachability from every context and from every 'inscriber', possess a structural anonymity. The trouble is that, far from supporting it, this feature seems to destroy the very possibility of being with others. This anonymity is ineliminable, and any reading must pass through it. However, such anonymity is also essentially limited. There is no absolutely anonymous trait because its reading-response entails a singularity of its own (a 'this time', even if one structured by internal relations to other times). For this reason, such a response is best conceived as presuming, in each case, a spontaneous or originary apostrophe. That is, it is a turn to a living thing as an other in advance of evidence or reasons which might ground it. Responding to the behaviour of a living thing in this distinctive way is, here and now, to leap to a 'we'. This leap does not, however, constitute the other as other. Rather, it is what first assigns to a living thing the position of a subject. This, then, is the claim: that the individuation of a subject, the 'who', like the 'what', stands in need of a reading-response.
Simon Glendinning, On Being with Others: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida
