![handle is hein.journals/intjsemi29 and id is 1 raw text is: Int J Semiot Law (2016) 29:1-8
DOI 10.1007/si 1196-015-9454-5 CrossMark
(Re)Imagining Law: Marginalised Bodies/Indigenous
Spaces
Ben Hightower' - Kirsten Anker2
Published online: 28 December 2015
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
There are an infinite number of ways that the law marginalises groups of people.
What is meant here by the word 'marginalise' is the sense that the law treats certain
groups of people in particular ways: as inferior, less important, different to others, or
as members of a periphery, and with the intention of forcing them into or
maintaining their positions of powerlessness. In other words, if we consider the
etymology of the word, these are moments that people are forced to the margo, or
'edge' of the law. Normally, the existence of legal obligations speaks to the way in
which those within a society are bound to one another and to the law as an
enforceable system of rules. This includes the myriad of national or international
societies and their related laws. However, ironically, people remain bound to the
law even if those legal systems exclude them; or put another way, they are included
by their exclusion. The process of making such legal exclusions amounts to what
Agamben might consider 'abandonment' by the law [1, pp. 28-29]. Rather than
inclusion or complementary law, this practice reduces people to 'bare life' [1];
divorced from legal recognition and at the threshold of normalised political
societies. This, according to Agamaben, has overwhelmingly become a 'technique
of government' [2, p. 2].1 Likewise, Foucault would see legal marginalisation as a
Agamben notes that the state of exception, which he says is a kind of exclusion [1, p. 17], tends
increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics ... a technique
of government [2, p. 2].
® Ben Hightower
bhightow@uow.edu.au
® Kirsten Anker
Kirsten.anker@ mcgill.ca
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
2 McGill University, Montreal, Canada
I Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/intjsemi29&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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