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

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experience and unimpeded desires. Hobbes ‘natural man’ is the creature that does exactly as it pleases, takes exactly what its wants, calling whatever suits its momentary appetite ‘good’ and whatever displeases him, ‘evil’. It wanders without any moral compass, his wants unhindered. What Hobbes offers, I suggest, is fact a phantasmatical representation of the pre-verbal individual prior to its encounter with the symbolic and castration taking hold. Hobbes state of nature is an apt depiction of the world of Lacan’s infant who, unaware of its limit, experiences itself as all-powerful. Its primordial liberty is what is ‘lost’ in order to enter the social order; but it is also, however, a fantasmatical liberty, an expression of this illusion of omnipotence. Seen in this light, what Hobbes draws out perhaps more than any other social contract theorist is the extreme vulnerability that ‘natural man’ is in, which direly drives him into entering the contract with the Leviathan. That ‘fear of death’ is a fundamental fear, akin to that of the slave in Hegel’s master-slave relationship. It is not just the fear of dying after having lived a free life. It is the fear of not being able to live in the first place, to establish oneself as an autonomous self. In this light, then, in the contract that is passed between the individual and the Leviathan, the Leviathan is, much more fundamentally than has been recognised, the Other upon whom the self fundamentally depends in order to acquire the means to become herself. That contract serves to institute not merely the subject of the monarch, not merely the political subject (or the subject of a certain kind of political order). Rather it founds the speaking subject itself. It constitutes the individual as political animal. This is the true meaning of that symbolic pact: it is an exchange of the freedom to do however one pleases against language and the ability to act politically. It is underwritten, and herein lies Hobbes’ Lacanian insight, by a symbol, the Leviathan. 34
In Lacanian thought, one signifier in particular performs a similar function, which he terms ‘the name of the father’. 24 Lacan (1956) elaborates the concept notion in the same seminar III where he coins the concept of ‘quilting points’. He realises that there is a signifier more fundamental still, one that ‘holds no signifier’ (Lacan 1975, 74 my translation). This is properly the master signifier, or ‘pure signifier’ as Juranville (1984) captures it, in that it attaches to no particular signified but instead encompasses them all. It is the instance underwrites all other signifiers, all chains of signification. It is what makes meaning possible in the first place. Returning to developmental perspective to flesh out this complex concept, the father is the instance that triangulates the mother-child relationship and thereby opens it up to the symbolic. The father breaks the symbiosis between mother and child. This constitutes an essential loss; but it is also what ushers the child into the symbolic order and thereby institutes the possibility of symbolizing, of speaking. Subsequently, this instance detaches from the actual father in this primordial configuration, and becomes the Other that supports all social relationships, all possibility of interaction between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’. Hence why it a signifier, ‘the name of the father’. It is the signifier that designates the order of Other and, in doing so, underwrites the possibility of signification itself. In Hobbes’s world that signifier is none other than the Leviathan, the instance that makes possible two units interacting with one another with a set of shared meanings. 25 The State as Speaking Subject: Conclusions For IR Theory 24 To be specific, Lacan terms it at different stages of theoretical development, ‘The Name-of-the- Father’, ‘master signifier’ or ‘S1’. These terms are thus interchangeable at this final stage of my argument. 25 To clarify, the mother (once again, as a figure in the structure of the relationship, not as a real person) is the imaginary other, that is, the very first other, in the realm of identification and imaginary capture; where as the father constitutes properly the Other). 35
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 32 and 33: The symbolic, as we have seen, is t
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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