"The "I' doesn't stand outside of experience, but rather appears, for lack of a better word, as the effect of a substitution: its relation to others is an obligation it is compelled to honor in spite of its impoverishment - "an experience of anonymity," writes Thomas Wall in a gloss on Levinas, "(an experience in the absence of there being anyone there to have the experience)," or an experience of oneself that remains singularly unpresentable." (2)

"...anonymity evokes different types of social prevarication - hiddenness, secrecy, deceit, theatricality - and thus implies that the ethics of disclosure and concealment are of a piece: they involve wider cultural, philosophical, and political claims about the ways in which the permeable "I" or "nonself" withdraws from the transparency of the public sphere, as well as continues to live and feel such withdrawals. Thus, instead of conceiving the subject in terms of a putative depth model, whose avowed confessionalism sustains the self through recourse to an inalienable plenitude, anonymity serves to remind us of a disruption of ontological certainty, and thus provokes insight into the troubling ethical bonds of subjectivity." (5)

Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession.