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

Ultimately, what this reading of Hobbes drew out is that the speaking subject, theorised by
Jacques Lacan and operationalised in discursive approaches, provides a theoretically coherent and
methodologically parsimonious basis for conceptualising agency in international politics. On the one
hand it harbours a specific conception of the individual as a divided, speaking subject, as we have
seen. On other, however, as I have shown extensively elsewhere (Epstein 2010) the purchase of this
concept empirically is that it actually suspends all these ontological considerations, and provides a
parsimonious way of continuing to explore identity concerns. The parsimony stems from the absence
of having to hold any presumptions regarding the actor’s selves. Discursive approaches consider
simply what the actors say, in order to know, not just who they are, but what they achieve. This,
moreover, is what enables the analysis to move beyond IR’s characteristic state-centrism: the actors
coming into focus are simply those that have made a difference in a specific area of international
politics – whether these be states or Non-Governmental Organizations (see also Epstein 2008).
Lastly, to apprehend the actors of international politics as speaking subjects opens up the
question of the nature of the structures in interesting ways. First, no more than constructivism does it
preclude considerations of the material structures that preoccupied the rationalists. Discursive
approaches are not a totalizing enterprise that seeks to reduce everything to words or to crowd out
the central role of material interests in shaping international politics. Rather, they simply casts the
focus upon an additional type of social structures to those already in sight, namely the structures of
language themselves. What a careful reading of Hobbes shows is that they grow their roots within IR’s
own foundations.
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