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

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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. 28
Importantly, this needs to be understood against Hobbes’s broader theory of language developed two chapters prior to this passage, in his Chapter IV, ‘Of Speech’. Hobbes insistence on the ‘necessity of definitions’ makes it clear that this is a feature of language as a whole and not merely of moral predicates. This fastening together of signifiers and signifieds is a precondition for language to be able to function as the effective social bond that can contain the threat of disorder pertaining to the natural state. The Leviathan is this fastening instance. This enables us to revisit in a new light is readily most notorious passage of Hobbes (1946, 82) political treatise for IR, the passage in Chapter XIII describing the state of nature: In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by the sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [sic], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The grammatical negative, functions here, to draw on a photographic metaphor, as the negative vis-à-vis the print. The final picture of the state of nature captures exactly inverted what makes the symbolic order itself. Indeed Hobbes is careful to include the major cardinal points undergirding social life: markers of time and space, the possibility of cultivating the earth and indeed all cultural productions, the possibility of knowledge and indeed all peaceful interactions (including at the international level). The Leviathan, in turn, is the centre point of that symbolic order. It both refers to (signifies) and makes possible the symbolic order itself: it is the master signifier that guarantees the possibility of all signification. The Performativity of the Leviathan The performativity of the symbol Leviathan achieves can also be illuminated from within speech act theory. It operates on two different levels, on the level of what Hobbes achieved, first, and second, 29
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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 24 and 25: or signification. 17 The word does
Page 26 and 27: Part III: The Leviathan as the sign
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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