It's been about half a decade since Michel Foucault delivered his famous inaugural lecture "Orders of Discourse". Descriptive research into legal discourse, however, still predominates over the exploration of the hidden power relationship. This article aims to apply Foucault's insights into discourse to the field of law and further shed light on the in-depth interactive mechanism of power and discourse. By investigating how legal norms were legitimized from the very beginning, it's found that the legal compulsoriness and the compulsoriness of legal discourse are of the same origin.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault believes that discourse is in essence the force exerted on things. In the discourse theory, this kind of power is the vehicle that grants verbal communication structure-"illocutionary force", which makes the compulsoriness of legal discourse possible and at the same time imposes constraints on it. By introducing the concept of "illocutionary force" from classic discourse theory, the compulsory relationship between the orator and the audience in legal discourse has been revealed.To put it clearly, the relationship consists of external compulsoriness and internal compulsoriness, the former of which can be divided into three categories: "prohibition", "distinction" and "acknowledgement" and the later encompasses "commentary", "signature" and "paradigm".
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