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

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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 36
‘natural man’ or a powerless wordless infant, but the full-blown individual, complete with the trappings of agency. But it also means that the actor, the instance who enters into interactions with other actors, is always already a social being, who does not exist outside of its relation to the Leviathan-Other. It is, in Hobbes’ dramatization, simply crushed by all the dangers that loom in the state of nature. Finding a new basis for elaborating human agency first requires restoring these two halves to Hobbes’ individual, his ‘natural man’ and his political, that is to say, speaking subject. The picture thus emerging overlies Lacan’s subject. It reveals an individual fundamentally split between these two realms, the realm of immediate, unimpeded impulses (here is the state of nature) and the symbolic, the realm of language and the social; but also, importantly, an individual who (in normal circumstances) is not so rent between these two as to be reduced to paralysis. The speaking subject forever straddles these two realms, one foot in either. That tension is the motor of her desire. As I have shown extensively elsewhere, because it centrally foregrounds the individual’s desire (as does Hobbes’), Lacan’s theorisation avoids the critique levelled at certain post-structuralist theories of the subject, notably in the wake of Michel Foucault, for eliminating agency (Epstein 2010). Lacan’s is indeed a fully-fledged theory of agency, only one that carefully circumscribes where the subject acts, and where she is acted upon by the structures, social and linguistic, within which she is enmeshed; in accordance with a structurationist social theory. It is precisely because theirs are theories that centre upon this dynamic component of the human psyche, desire, that Lacan and Hobbes need to be reckoned with in appraising agency. Desire, in both Lacan and Hobbes, is the engine, not of the natural individual (that was the fear of death, in Hobbes) but of human agency itself – that is, of the whole of the individual rather than only half. Hobbes’ desire for power that so captured the 37
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 34 and 35: experience and unimpeded desires. H
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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