We have inherited magic words, which we do not wish to touch for fear of causing their (shimmering) wings to lose a little of their dazzling dust. We have inherited from distant words, Latin words, Justice, Truth, Humanity. Or from a Greek cousin, Democracy. And this inheritance accompanies us, sends us messages, glistening incitements. We are enchanted. Are they allegories? And then all these ravishing words are feminine in those gendered languages. Surreptitiously added to their charm is a pinch of difference, a sexual dusting, a slight exaltation. By virtue of what are we ‘human’, by virtue of what do we say that we are? By the fact that we read.

We are reading, in the morning as soon as it is day, we read – from the cradle, from the first gaze we already want to belong to a gaze and fall under a gaze, already we are reading. We are giving ourselves to (be) read. We are making links. We are mirroring ourselves in the mirror of the other. Is this the beginning of being human? We are reading whom and what? We are reading ‘someone’ who reads us. What we are doing when we read Jaurès,’ Jacques Derrida said to us (and I am listening and reading carefully what he says – I note already he has constituted with two words a community to which we who say ‘we’ are invited – it is the community-of-we-who-read-Jaurès – or someone equal to Jaurès – an equivalent – the name Jaurès standing for an exemplary representative of any being to be read) – I continue reading Jacques Derrida reading Jaurès: ‘or the works of those who are no more’ (that is, naturally any work for ‘to read is always to read in the absence of the author’ adds Jacques Derrida.