ABSTRACT

This paper offers a phenomenology of the politics of a-legality, the legal mode of appearance of the strange, itself a recurrent motif of phenomenological philosophy. A-legality concerns behavior that appears as either legal or illegal (hence the “legality” of a-legality), yet which is also unintelligible in its legal intelligibility because it resists qualification through both terms of this binary distinction (hence the “a” of a-legality). Focusing on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy events that took place in Canberra in 1972 and on the famous Mabo vs Queensland (No 2) case, the paper argues that if collective intentionality is the privileged gateway to a phenomenology of a-legality, representation and recognition illuminate the political and legal stakes of collective intentionality.