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

subject that function as anchoring points, where the signifier and the signified are knotted together. The
analogy here is that the upholstery button is a place where the mattress-maker’s needle has worked to
prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from shifting about. It becomes the organizing point running
through broader discourses, a form of overarching referent point for multiple individual utterances; not
unlike the lines radiating from the upholstery button on the mattress’s surface. While Lacan coined the
concept to analyse the individual’s discourse, the concept was developed in his wake to analyse political
discourses at large (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Edkins 1999, Stavrakakis 1999, Zizek 2003). It constitutes a
key signifier that unifies the discursive field, fixing the meaning of otherwise open-ended and often
ambiguous terms, or ‘essentially contested concepts’ as Walter Gallie’s called them (see Gellner 1974
for a discussion), ‘such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Slavoj Zizek (2003, 282), for example, shows how,
under communism, certain signifiers, such as ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘the state’, acquired a
particular meaning when ‘quilted’ by the signifier/point de capiton ‘communism’. The same words rang
quite differently in the West where they were ‘quilted’ otherwise.
These signifiers, however, designate a political order, not the order underlying the possibility of
politics itself. This is precisely what Hobbes nailed with the Leviathan. What the signifier-Leviathan
designates in Hobbes’s political thought is nothing short of the symbolic itself. As such, and albeit to
Schmitt’s dismay, it has to be open-ended, its meanings inexhaustible. It necessarily eludes all attempts
to pin it down to a set number of signified, because it operates as the master signifier that designates
the symbolic at large. Just as the ‘quilting point’ is the point at which a signifier is knotted to the
otherwise indeterminate and floating signified, the Leviathan is the instance that fastens the otherwise
ever shifting and always relative meaning of ‘good’ to a fixed, objective and commonly agreed upon set
of understandings as to what constitutes the Good.
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