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

or signification. 17 The word does not reveal the world because, and this was his central contribution, the
relationship between the signifier and the signified is purely arbitrary (l’arbitraire du signe), since
different languages feature different signs for the same the same referent. That is, that relationship is
neither given nor automatic; rather it is grounded solely in social conventions. As a result language
should be appraised not in its relation to the world but on its own terms, as a system of differential
elements. Signs hold no inherent meaning outside of the broader signifying system which they implicitly
bring into play when used; and that meaning is both yielded and exhausted by the play of difference
between them. The meaning of ‘hot’ is given by contrast with ‘cold’ and vice versa, and on its own the
phoneme ‘hot’ does not trigger any meaningful association in the mind of someone who does not speak
English. Thus meaning, signification, emerges from a contingent relationship between signifiers.
Lacan’s blended together the linguistic turn in philosophy with Saussure’s work on the linguistic
sign, on whose terminology he drew extensively. Saussure’s analysis of language as a structured system
provided the matrix for Lacan’s central contribution to psychoanalytic knowledge, the discovery of the
structure of the unconscious. Contrary to naturalist interpretations that developed in the wake of
Freud’s discovery, though his clinical practice Lacan established that the unconscious was not simply the
recipient of blind biological drives.
18
Instead it too presents a basic structure akin to the structure of
language as revealed by Saussure (l’inconscient est structuré comme un language). In that sense it
cannot be interpreted as the pre-social or natural site within the human psyche.
The effect of Saussure’s discovery was to cast the focus upon the signifier, and its relationship to
other signifiers, rather than on the relationship between the signifier and the signified. In his wake the
17 A sign in Saussurian linguistics is composed of a signifier and a signified. Importantly, the signified is
not the real object denoted by the sign – the referent – but a psychological entity, a mental
representation of the object.
18 Which is not to say that Lacan denies that the vital energy mobilized by the drives; but rather these
are not reducible to biological mechanisms alone. What distinguishes them from biological needs is that
they can never be satisfied (see Lacan 1964).
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