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

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in terms of what the Leviathan achieves. With regards to the first, as Patricia Springboard (1995, 353) notes, Hobbes is credited for ‘lexical innovation’ by the Oxford English Dictionary for coining what became common currency in the English language for representing the British Commonwealth. His creative act consisted in tying together the concrete biblical image (the whale) with this abstract political notion (a commonwealth). As for the second, John Watkins (1989, 111) for his part has underlined the ways in which speech and action are co-extensive in the figure of the Leviathan. 21 ‘In declaring something to be right or wrong, a sovereign is not describing it or making a statement about it. His declaration is, to use John Austin’s term, a “performative”’. The function of the Leviathan, in other words, is not merely one of revealing a pre-existing natural or divine order (as in correspondence theory of the world), but of actual constitution. There are thus two parallel levels of constitution at play. Hobbes’s sovereigns actually ‘make the things they command [sic]’. What the leviathan makes, above all is the social order itself, that which makes possible all ulterior conventions. Taking this line of argument beyond Watkins (1989) and indeed Austin (1962) himself, the type of performative power implied in the sovereign speech act could be said to be pre-locutionary. It is not simply an act that is supported by social conventions, as in illocutionary acts (such as the judge who pronounces a sentence). Rather, it is one that makes all social conventions possible in the first place. It is also therefore what enables perlocutionary acts to take effect (acts that operate by way of consequence rather than conventions per se, as in offending someone by insulting them), to name the other key type of speech act in speech act theory. Watkins for his part develops his argument by way of the act of naming, comparing the Leviathan’s speech act to that of the clergyman who christens a child. Remarkably, in a Lacanian perspective, the act of naming is precisely what inscribes the child into the 22 22 For a different critique of Watkin’s use of performatives see Weiler 1970. 30
symbolic order. This initial inscription (whether performed by a clergyman or not) is what makes all social existence and indeed identity possible for the individual, as we will see in the following section. However the clergyman operates on pre-existing conventions. The Leviathan, for its part, is the signifier that ‘names’ the symbolic order; that is, it brings into existence the symbolic order itself. Thus far ahead of Lacan, in coining the symbol Hobbes names the instance that makes all naming possible. The Leviathan is, to sum up the argument so far, the signifier that makes all signification possible. The Leviathan as the Master Signifier that Makes All Signification Possible The Leviathan as Lacan’s Other The function that the Leviathan performs at the collective level is that it is the master signifier that designates the symbolic at large – and thus the very possibility of such a level existing in the first place. The second movement of my argument concerns the function it performs at the individual level. A key problem for Hobbes was to find the basis of the relationship between the individual and the sovereign within the individual herself, in order to explain and legitimise her entry into the social contract as an internal necessity. In the words of the historian of political thought Michel Foucault (75, my translation): What, indeed, was the sovereign (…) for Hobbes? (…) [it was] the instance capable of saying no to the individual’s desiderata; the problem then being how this ‘no’ (…) could be legitimate and founded in this individual’s very own will.' Donning these Lacanian lenses allows us to see the extent to which Hobbes achieves exactly that; and far more so than Foucault had actually gauged. This part of my argument rests upon the third axis of the symbolic in Lacanian thought, flagged but left under-developed in the previous section, the symbolic as the order of the Other. I first return to flesh out that category in order to that show that the Leviathan designates the Other; which is also to say that it corresponds to the ‘Name of the Father’ in the Lacanian framework. 31
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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 28 and 29: subject that function as anchoring
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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