1 Theorising Agency in International Relations In Hobbes's Wake ...

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within and beyond the text, it is instead to embrace its ambiguousness as a starting point. The Leviathan operates as the central signifier at work in his political treatise; that much Schmitt would not disagree with, albeit in a different language. To continue to usher in here the linguistic terminology, his is an effort to map out the field of significations, or ‘signified’, conjured by the signifier. The attitude I propose, however, is, rather than rather than seek to exhaust its significations, is to appraise how it operates as an open-ended signifier. This ambiguousness and polysemy are an integral part of its constitution as, and this is the core of argument, the master signifier of the symbolic order itself (terms I am about to explain). As such it cannot be pinned down to one signification nor indeed rid of its ambiguousness. Rather, its ability to condense as many meanings as possible is central to its functioning as the master signifier that underpins the possibility of signification itself. To develop this argument, however, I first require introducing Lacan’s broader categories of the symbolic and the primacy of the signifier, in order to show the Leviathan constitutes in fact the symbol, or signifier, designating the political order at large, whether at the national or international level. Introducing Jacques Lacan From the Symbol to The Symbolic ‘The symbolic’ in Lacanian terminology designates the political order at large. What, then, is distinctive about this understanding of the social, and why is it pertinent to interpreting Hobbes? Three key features are helpful to contextualizing this notion of the symbolic in Lacan’s body of thought, namely, its language-based, clinical, and developmental dimensions. First, for Lacan the defining characteristic of humans as political animals is speech. The ability to speak is all at once the basis of all social and political life, and what makes individual identity, indeed all life as a political animal, possible. Language thus stands at the centre of his theorizing because it is the foundation of the social order itself. Here he is uncannily close to Hobbes (1946, 18) when he writes that 18
‘the most notable inventions of all was that of speech (…) without which, there had been amongst men neither common wealth, no society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears or wolves.’ The centrality of language is the distinctive feature of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, a large part of which developed as a reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud’s discoveries in order to draw out the efficaciousness of language. It is also what lends a distinctively collective, which is to say, political, dimension to his theorizing (Stavarkakis 1999, Edkins 1999). If the task of psychoanalytic theorizing can be understood as the effort, in Freud’s wake, to uncover the deep structures of the human psyche on the one hand, in order to understand, on the other, how the individual relates (or fails) to the world around her, then one of Lacan’s key contribution was to draw out the extent to which these two dimensions, the individual and the collective, are tightly bound up. That contribution in turn rests on his foregrounding language as the primary social bond. Language, that distinctly human trait, is what leads humans out of the state of nature and makes all social (in Hobbes) and individual (in Lacan) life possible in the first place Second, although Lacan centrally foregrounds language, it is important to bear in mind that his is fundamentally applied theory. His theorising is geared towards analytical practice, not towards understanding literary texts or language per se. It mobilises the key insight, common also to speech act theory, that words do things, to echo Austin’s (1962) formulation. Theory and practice are here tightly bound up as in few other contemporary spaces for theorizing the political. Here too there is a closeness to the realm of practice that is akin to that of Hobbes who, writing during the English civil war (1642- 1651), stood before a civil order that was coming undone, and thus at a juncture where the task of political theorizing was more directly efficacious than in these societies today. Both constitute bodies of thought developed with the pressing urgency of an ailment to cure, in the political and in the individual body respectively. Lacan’s starting point is thus the individual’s experience; he sets out to uncover the deep structures undergirding her relationship to the world around her. 19
Page 2 and 3: 2001). As the seat of human agency,
Page 4 and 5: foundation for elaborating a type o
Page 6 and 7: ones; to the extent that it is dire
Page 8 and 9: away from the ‘Hobbesian traditio
Page 10 and 11: Classical realism thus cast its len
Page 12 and 13: Gauthier is right to find in Hobbes
Page 14 and 15: he mobilises Searle’s distinction
Page 16 and 17: What did carry over from Hobbes , m
Page 20 and 21: This explains, second, the diachron
Page 22 and 23: The imaginary is also the site wher
Page 24 and 25: or signification. 17 The word does
Page 26 and 27: Part III: The Leviathan as the sign
Page 28 and 29: subject that function as anchoring
Page 30 and 31: in terms of what the Leviathan achi
Page 32 and 33: The symbolic, as we have seen, is t
Page 34 and 35: experience and unimpeded desires. H
Page 36 and 37: Reading Hobbes through Lacan shines
Page 38 and 39: imagination of the discipline’s f
Page 40 and 41: Citations Aron, Raymond (1966 [1962
Page 42 and 43: Hansen, L.(2006), Security As Pract
Page 44 and 45: Morgenthau, Hans J. (1960), Politic
Page 46: Wolfers, Arnold (1962), Discord and

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