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

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The imaginary is also the site where these primitive projections have been repressed onto an unconscious level. This invokes the more applied dimension of Lacan’s work, where the symbolic constitutes, third, the realm of the analytical cure. The cure itself largely consists in making those imaginary projections lodged in the unconscious (especially those revolving around processes of identification, see Epstein 2010 for an extensive development), which can play the analysand’s despite herself and at great expense of suffering, pass into the symbolic order. There they can be worked on with analyst, fully circumscribed, and ultimately put at a remove. The cure illustrates the extent to which language is performative for Lacan. It is doubly performative, as both the primary material of and the medium for the cure. Language both reveals the source of the ailments on the one hand (when the analysand talks), and it constitutes the means of the therapeutic intervention on the other (the analysts’ intervention). The aim of the cure is the symbolization of the imaginary material expressed in the analysand’s speech. The intervention of the analyst consists in interrupting these imaginary projections in which the speaker remains trapped. The Lacanian analysis thus rests on a particular type of speech act. 15 To summarise, the symbolic plays out along three key axes in Lacan’s thought. It is the realm of the cure, whose basic operative principle is symbolization. The second and third axes outline the two directions in which my argument proper will unfold in the third and fourth parts of this paper, where I will show that the Leviathan constitutes the master signifier that enables all signification. These are that, at the collective level, second, the symbolic designates the social order itself. At the level of individual experience this corresponds, third, to the Other for the self. Developing my argument first requires however, adding another piece to this toolkit, the Lacian notion of ‘primacy of the signifier’ (la primauté 15 The expression used by Alain Juranville (1984), awkward in English yet effective, is ‘a speech that takes action’ (une parole qui prend acte). 22
du signifiant). I explain it in the following section by locating it within the broader linguistic turn from which it emerged. The Primacy of the Signifier Language then, is foundational to Jacques Lacan’s entire enterprise. He was largely influenced, first, by developments contemporary philosophy of language (Heiddegger’s writings on speech or Sprache and Logos in particular, see Juignet 2003). These in turn need to be understood in relation to the broader shattering of the correspondence theory of the world that signalled the advent of modern conceptions of language, which is also at the origins of constructivism in IR. Words were no longer seen to mirror the things they invoked; and the (social) world was no longer that fixed referent outside of language that was ultimately underpinned, in a medieval post-Aristotelian ontology, by god itself. The advent of the linguistic turn was brought on by the realization that words do not merely reveal but partially constitute the social world. 16 While the term itself tends to be used to characterizes a latemodern developments in the philosophy of languages, it appears, as Terence Ball (1985, 741) has pointed out ‘almost as a instance of uncoordinated simultaneous discovery’ across the social sciences and humanities in the late 20 th century, including in IR. Or rather, Ball’s argument is that it was in fact a long drawn out discovery that extends back to Hobbes, in whom he sees the precursor to this linguistic turn in late modernity. Developments in structuralism, in particular Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) discoveries in structural linguistics (and, later, Claude Levi Strauss’s structural anthropology) comprise the second key influence on the emergence of Lacanian thought. Saussure took this modern conception of language one step further. Working up close with words, or signs, he showed that the relationship between the word and the world constitutes the wrong starting point altogether for understanding the making of meaning, 16 The term ‘linguistic turn’ is attributed to Richard Rorty’s 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method (see Ball 1985), who in turn attributes it to Gustave Bergmann. 23
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 18 and 19: within and beyond the text, it is i
Page 20 and 21: This explains, second, the diachron
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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