Modern identity is constituted through the exclusion of its own opposite

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Non-identical thinking requires resisting the identity principle that flattens qualitative difference. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1246; Authenticity is a socially constructed ideal defined only against what it is not. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 651; Every dominant image of the human is defined against the possibilities it excludes — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 162 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Identity is constituted through exclusion of what it is not #corroborates (1.00)
• Individual identity forms dialogically through a constitutive outside, not autonomously. #corroborates (0.92) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 363
• Identity is constituted through splitting and an interiorized Other, not pure difference. #complicates (0.82)
• Contemporary identity is self-fashioning rather than fixed essence #complicates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 232