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

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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
The Leviathan posits the site of the original division of labour between political theory and international relations, which revolves around two related yet distinct clusters of meanings. IR, the discipline that carved its remit out as the relations between states, considers the Leviathan as the state, envisaged from without; whereas Political Theory appraises the sovereign, envisaged from within. From there, in IR, questions pertaining to the relationship between the Leviathan and the subject have been largely black-boxed and attention largely shifted to the other pole of the narrative; such that the Hobbesian legacy in IR has largely revolved around the state of nature rather than the figure of the Leviathan. As such the Leviathan is, via realist readings, both taken for granted as the discipline’s founding currency yet largely lost from sight. My contention is that returning to appraise it fully as a symbol draws out yet another level of meaning, beyond the state or the sovereign, that reveals something fundamental about the possibility of interacting politically that is pertinent for understanding international order. 7 Before turning to that symbol I etch out a very brief history of the discipline under the prism of the relationship to Hobbes in order to show the ways in which the Hobbesian state of nature has explicitly or implicitly informed conceptions of agency in international politics. Hobbes the Realist Ever since realism first laid claim to Hobbes’s state of nature as its founding myth, the history of International Relations Theory (IRT) has been punctuated by a succession of efforts to recover Hobbes 7 A note here to clarify my terminology. A symbol is rhetorical trope, used especially in religion or art for example, in which representations of concrete objects serve to invoke abstract, non-figurable qualities (associated with the divine, for example). The prefix sym (‘with’) signifies this joining together. The core question explored as part of the argument itself is, once we suspend these two meanings conventionally attributed to it (the state and the sovereign), what else has the Leviathan been joined to? A myth for its part is a literary trope that comprises a narrative, dynamic component and some form of resolution or denouement (Souriau 1990). I thus use the term ‘myth’ to refer to Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’, that place that humans leave to form a polity. When referring to the Leviathan I alternate between the neutral term ‘figure’ and ‘symbol’, which is thematised as part of the argument itself. 7
Page 2 and 3: 2001). As the seat of human agency,
Page 4 and 5: foundation for elaborating a type o
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 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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