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

This explains, second, the diachronic or developmental perspective by which he seeks to
understand how an individual is born into these structures, driven by that imperative to diagnose the
source of her contemporary ailments. In this he positions himself in a somewhat similar stance to
Hobbes’s, at the origin of the social order. Both similarly develop diachronic perspectives, in Hobbes’s
case, to retrace the passage from a pre-social to a social order. In Lacan, the trajectory of the individual’s
development and her account of it become the analytical material itself. Timelines are thus central
operative principles both in Hobbes’s treatise and in Lacan’s clinical practice, but theirs are diachronic
rather than historical perspectives since history is mythical in both instances. What matters is not the
accuracy of the narrative so much as history’s function as a myth at the collective level (in Hobbes) or its
narration by the speaking subject as that which the analyst and analysand can work on (in Lacan).
The Three Axes of the Lacanian Symbolic
The symbolic is then, is the social order in a simplified sense. Having etched out the logic of
Lacanian theorising now enables us to flesh out this complex concept more substantially, along three
axes. It was coined to capture, first, the ensemble of symbols that constitute a culture, apprehended
as a structured totality. At a more generic level, it designates the matrix or organizing principle
undergirding all social life. Language and the law are its primary sites of expressions, and they are
tightly bound up. Indeed, Lacan developed the concept by building on Freud’s (1913) analysis of the
incest taboo and the role of the father figure as the founding stone for the social order at large. 14 The
father’s initial, symbolic (rather than actually pronounced; and therefore forever potentially
reiterated) pronouncement of the incest prohibition is the mythical founding speech act that, by
drawing the first line between the forbidden and the authorised, founds the law and thus the
14 To be clear this father figure, or symbolic father, does not refer to the actual, real genitor; but rather
simply to an instance constitutive of the human psyche. As such, there is no implication whatsoever that
this person need be a male; but rather any person who simply takes on this symbolic function in the
development of the child.
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