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

Reading Hobbes through Lacan shines a drastically different light upon the individual that has stood in
the discipline’s sights ever since it turned to Hobbes’ state of nature for its first cues about the
structure of the international system (in realism); and that remained in its sights even when it moved
away from Hobbes to further distil the essence of these unit’s selves (in constructivism). Specifically, it
restores the half of the Hobbesian individual that was hidden by IR’s lenses being fastened upon the
state of nature alone. The key realist insight that does carry over into a Lacanian reading is that the
agonistic relations dramatized by his mythical nature, that state of permanent and latent warfare
between the units, is constitutive and it is structural. Where the Lacanian reading departs from
realism, however, is that, with Hobbes’ full picture and the Leviathan back in sights, that unit is not a
discrete, self-contained entity or billiard ball; nor does it consequently yield an atomistic billiard board
of utility-maximising units – whether colliding or rolling in the same direction.
This individualist conception of the individual, for which Hobbes’ ‘natural man’ was first
marshalled by rationalism, and which has not been entirely shaken off by constructivism’s concept of
the ‘self’, actually falls short of appreciating just how far Hobbes reaches in foregrounding the fear of
death as prime mover of this ‘natural man’s’ behaviour. This fear is indeed what drives the individual,
and subsequently for realism, states, to seek security as their primary objective, to echo Aron’s (1966,
72) words. But it is also what drives the individual to not dwell in the state of nature at all. Hence
freezing the narrative at this point to uphold only the state of nature in focus makes little sense. What
is to be found there, a Lacanian reading reveals, is nothing but a wordless infant, a naked being
stripped of the trappings of agency, a pre-actor, whose life would be very short indeed. The rational
actor, for its part, that is, an actor presumably equipped with the means to act – who can, say, talk
and walk, at the very least – is the one who leaves the state of nature as quickly as possible and
contracts with the Leviathan in order to stay alive. That is the rational thing to do. That survival is at
stake is true in a fundamental, constitutive sense. It is what constitutes the individual per se; not a
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