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

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The symbolic, as we have seen, is the order of the Other. The order into which the individual is initially inscribed by being ‘named into it’ is, initially, fundamentally alien to the speechless infant. The words that the infant acquires initially belong, quite literally, to a foreign world; an order that pre-exists it and where these words already hold given meanings. To learn to speak is to step into this alien order. The symbolic is that world. It designates the place of the Other, constituting all at once the reservoir of pre-existing signifiers (its ‘treasure chest’ as Lacan (2006, 336) also calls it) and the original addressee, that is, the instance with whom the infant first interacts and in interacting with whom it learns how to speak (the figure of the mother). To speak, to convey meaning (to another social being) is only ever to draw upon pre-existing signifiers. To draw upon, or better said in a Lacanian sense to borrow: becoming a social animal rests on a foundational debt; ‘the Great Debt’ as Lacan (2006, 74) called it. This is the symbolic debt that one incurs in borrowing signifiers from the Other in order to be able to be understood, and therefore to be acknowledged as being part of (and functioning in) that symbolic order. Lacan (2006, 66-67) emphasises the mythical origin of the ‘symbol’ as both ‘a gift’ and a ‘pact’ that all at once indebts and binds together those who receive it (the Argonauts in his example), creating the basic social bond. 23 What, then, underwrites this debt, and whence does it draw its power? This ‘stepping into’ the Symbolic is not merely the acquisition of a positive, distinctly human, neurological capacity of speech a la Chomsky (1981). To the contrary, what Lacan draws out is that it is premised on a constitutive loss. Alienation within the symbolic order is a basic condition of one’s becoming a social 23 Rites and celebrations, such as Christmas celebrations, offer a good place to observe the symbolic reproduce itself. The giving of gifts, to children in particular, can be read as instantiating, with a happy face, the debt that is being incurred by their insertion into the symbolic order, by their becoming adults (which will then lead them to ‘give back’ to other children in order to observe the rite, and thereby in turn partake in the further perpetuation of the symbolic). 32
eing. Lacan captures this foundational loss, or lack, with his concept of castration. To be clear, it has nothing to do with the physical act of mutilation; we are not here in the realm of the real here but rather within the symbolic. This is in fact the concept that centrally underpins. It captures the original forsaking that each of us undergoes in order to accede to language. Subsequently, however, we forever uncomfortably straddle these two realms, the realm of immediate, preverbal experience (the world of raw needs, impulses, frustrations, anger and joy; of the imaginary and the real); and the mediated realm of the symbolic, into which we must first be integrated into in order to express that experience. But to be able to express it is also to loose it in its raw, immediate form; herein lies the constitutive split that marks the tragedy of the human condition. Words can never completely convey exactly what the speaker wants to say. For it to be said it must be mediated by words that belong to everyone, words that hold generic meanings and are thus fundamentally ill-fitted for that unique and immediate impulse that led the subject to want to speak in the first place. As Lacan put it in his (1977) famous quips, ‘the thing must be lost in order to be expressed’, or again that ‘speech is the murder of the thing’. The ‘thing’ in its original, raw individualised form must be relinquished so as to be fitted into existing signifiers and thereby communicated. This forsaking is a condition of entry into the symbolic; it is what one gives up in order to be able to become a social, speaking being. ‘Man [sic] speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man’ (Lacan 2006, 72) The Social Contract as Castration and the Leviathan as the ‘Name of the Father’ This symbolic debt casts a new light on the depths that, I argue, Hobbes plumbs with the understanding of the social contract he puts forward. First, in contracting with the Leviathan, the individual forsakes her liberty in exchange for securing her life and, centrally, being rid of the fear of death. That fundamental freedom, I argue, is that which pertains to the realm of immediate 33
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 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 30 and 31: in terms of what the Leviathan achi
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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