This category may be suggested by the proposition that every element of a group is not only a societal part but, in addition, something else. However trivial it may seem, this fact nevertheless operates as a social a priori. For that part of the individual which is, as it were, not turned toward society and is not absorbed by it, does not simply lie beside its socially relevant part without having a relation to it. It is not simply something outside society to which society, willingly or unwillingly, submits. Rather, the fact that in certain respects the individual is not an element of society constitutes the positive condition for the possibility that in other respects he is: the way in which he is sociated is determined or codetermined by the way in which he is not.

XREF: Simmel's relational sociology — resembles the figure/ground logic where the individual's nonsocial residue shapes social form, echoing his dialectical method elsewhere in his essays.

XREF: Echoes a dialectical or relational view of sociality — the outside constitutes the inside, reminiscent of Simmel's relational sociology and even the idea that exclusion enables inclusion.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 178