Law as Discourse, Law as Power: A Foucauldian Analysis of Legal Semiotics and Subjectivation
摘要
This chapter offers a Foucauldian analysis of law as a semiotic and discursive formation that operates not merely through rules but through the production of meaning, subjectivity, and institutional authority. Drawing on the concepts of power/knowledge, discipline, and governmentality, it examines how legal discourse constructs regimes of truth, organizes visibility, and shapes the affective and symbolic conditions of recognition. Law is approached not as a neutral mechanism of governance but as a performative apparatus that functions through language, ritual, spatial design, and normative classification. The discussion traces how legal authority is enacted via disciplinary institutions, aesthetic codes, and codified gestures that produce the illusion of neutrality and legitimacy. It then considers how law administers populations and constitutes legal subjects through categories that regulate access to recognition, protection, and control. Rather than mirroring social order, law emerges as one of its most powerful producers, a regime of signs that operates through repetition, exclusion, and the institutionalization of meaning.