IDENTITY'S RELATION TO THE OTHER: FIXED (AND VIOLENT) OR ONGOING AND IN PROCESS?

Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures), edited by Kobena Mercer, foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017):

Without its specific histories, identity would not have the symbolic resources with which to construct itself anew. Without its various languages, identify would be deprived of the capacity to enunciate--to speak and to act in the world. To locate oneself within a language is to take up its interdiscursive field of meanings. And since all identities must significantly mark that similarity to and difference from something else--for meaning is always relational and positional--then every identity, however provisionally it asserts itself, must always have a symbolic "other," which is what defines its constitutive outside. The difference lies not in whether there is, in fact, such an other to which our identities relate, but in whether the representation of that difference, that relationship to others, is fixed and degraded, so it becomes the objective symbolic violence, as in the operations of power in Hegel's master/slave dialectic, for instance, or whether the discursive inscription of difference is able to establish with others a dialogic relationship to alterity that, within this more Bakhtinian and Levinasian framework, can never be fixed and finalized but is always ongoing and in process.

Id. at 128-129