Individual identity forms dialogically through a constitutive outside, not autonomously.

Evidence

What Michael Walzer famously called “Liberalism 1” constitutes one of the great discursive systems of the modern world, making in recent years virtually a clean sweep of political theory. Only a thin definition of culture and a highly attenuated notion of collective rights is compatible with the individualist emphasis at the center of this market-liberal conception. It does not recognize the degree to which the individual is what Taylor (1994) calls “dialogic”—not in the binary sense of dialogue between two already-constituted subjects, but in the sense of its relation to the other being fundamentally constitutive of the subject, which can position itself as an “identity” only in relation to what it lacks—its other, its “constitutive outside” (Lacan 1977; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler 1993). The meaningful individual life is always embedded in cultural contexts within which alone its “free choices” make sense. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 363

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘dialogic’ self (Taylor) and the ‘constitutive outside’ (Lacan, Laclau and Mouffe, Butler) — core mechanisms of how the Other constitutes the subject, central to Orientalism-context theory.
• XREF: Ties directly to the ‘constitutive outside’ logic in Laclau/Mouffe discourse theory and Butler’s subject-formation, and to how the ‘Other’ in Islamophobia discourse is structurally required for Western self-definition. — connects to: Encountering the Other reveals the for-itself having an outside and being embedded in being; The for-itself is originally dispersed outside itself and must seek its being elsewhere; Oppressed persons first grasp their shared condition as being looked at from outside. (+34 more)
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how ‘thin culture’ liberalism structurally cannot theorize the collective dimensions that racialized religious minorities are read through.