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

ones; to the extent that it is directly pertinent to thinking about the type of minimalist, anarchical
order that obtains in the international system. In this reading, then, the Leviathan designates not a
particular type of political order, conditioned upon sovereignty, but the very condition of possibility of
ordered interactions in the first place. It designates, in other words, the condition of possibility of
political order itself, whether at the national or international level. That sine qua non, without which
there is not anarchy but properly chaos, for Hobbes, is the possibility, not of acting in concert, nor even
of a common agreement, but of the actors being able to understand one another. It is the possibility of a
set of shared meanings existing between them, however rudimentary; or, in other words, of a common
language – that with which a state, for example, understands that war has been declared upon it by
another. 6
The corollary to this argument at the individual level directly speaks to the issue of conceptions
of the individual. It is developed in the fourth and final part of the paper. To appraise the Leviathan, not
as the state, nor as the sovereign, but as the condition of possibility or order itself, is to draw out a key
function it holds within the individual’s psyche. The Leviathan is, I suggest, the equivalent of Lacan’s
Other, without which the self cannot make itself. It performs the function that designates as the ‘Name
of the Father’ with regards to the individual’s relationship to language and her entry into sociality.
Consequently the dynamics that drive the individual to contract with the Leviathan are none other than
those subsequently unravelled by the castration complex in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Implications
for IR theory are considered in closing and specifically, what it means to apprehend the state as a
speaking subject, rather than a rational actor or a self, in the study of international politics.
In the Leviathan’s Wake: from the Rational Actor to the Self
6 While my argumentation will remain state-centric, both for reasons of parsimony and in order to
remain in keeping with the theories with which it engages, a key implication is that the state need not
remain the centre point of discursive approaches (see, however, Epstein 2010 to move beyond this state
centrism).
6