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

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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). 24
signifier takes center stage in Lacan. But what is known as ‘the primacy of the signifier’ in Lacanian thought (la primauté du signifiant) implies something more. In Saussure, the world out there remains a distant referent for the signified. Lacan goes one step further still in shearing the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and in casting the focus upon the signifier alone. Lacan finds that what the signifier uttered by the individual is conjuring is not always merely the world out there. Recall here that his perspective is the individual and her speech (la parole, in the Saussurian terminology), as opposed to the collective perspective of Saussure and the philosophers of language (la langue). Not only does it not straightforwardly mirror the world out there (as in Saussure 1916), but, for Lacan, that speech also points instead to the inner world of the speaking subject, the unconscious level of inarticulate desires. Hence what the signifier can capture, and in fact what it alone can capture, is her desire; that same desire that the analyst seeks to tease out from amidst the mesh of images, identifications, and repressive mechanisms, in order to shepherd it towards symbolization. Bound up as it is with vital energy and basic needs, that desire is forever expressing itself; often at the individual’s expense, notably in so called Freudian slips or actes manqués. The task of the analyst is thus to hear the desire that sometimes eludes the analysand and yet expresses itself in her speech. The analyst is listening out for the key signifiers, expressive of another level of signification, that erupt at times through the analysand’s speech, and work both at the surface level of what the analysand intends to say (often something about the world), while also offering a window onto her unconscious. Piecing these together she can begin to map out the chains of significations structuring the person’s desire. On the one hand Lacan’s analytical thought and practice foregrounds primacy of the signifier, on the other Hobbes’s political treaty features one primary signifier, the Leviathan. These Lacanian conceptualizations of the symbolic and the signifier provide the starting points for developing the first part of my argument, which is that the Leviathan is the signifier of the symbolic order at large. 25
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 22 and 23: The imaginary is also the site wher
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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