This is a crucial point which the notion of the 'constitutive outside',
borrowed from Derrida, can help us to elucidate. One of Derrida's
central ideas is that the constitution of an identity is always based on
excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the
resultant two poles - form/matter, essence/accident, blade/white, man/
woman, and so on. This reveals that there is no identity that is self-
present to itself and not constructed as difference, and that any social
objectivity is constituted through acts of power. It means that any
sodal objectivity is ultimately political and has to show traces of the
exclusion which governs its constitution, what we can call its
'constitutive outside'. As a consequence, all systems of social relations
imply to a certain extent relations of power, since the construction of a
social identity is an act of power.