The most notable inventions of all was that of speech … without which, there had been amongst men [sic] neither common wealth, no society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears or wolves.
—Thomas HobbesFootnote 1Like the words uttered by God in Genesis, speech is a symbolic invocation which creates, ex nihilo, a new order of being in the relations between men [sic].
—Jacques LacanFootnote 2The rational actor stands at the heart of rationalist accounts of international politics. By contrast, constructivists suggest that actors' agency is shaped as much by an actor's context as by intrinsic interests. At its core, the rationalist-constructivist divide that organizes much of contemporary International Relations (IR) scholarship revolves around divergent models of agency. The starting point for constructivist theorizing was the realization of the need to unpack the rationalist assumption that actors are “self-interested,” in order to examine who that “self” might be, as Wendt put it.Footnote 3 This ushered in identity as the defining consideration for that scholarship. One of its central legacies was to have tabled a different figure of actorhood, a “self” enmeshed in its interactions with “others” within broader social structures. The constructivist challenge, however, also opened up the fundamental question with which this article engages: What conception of the individual provides the adequate foundations for theorizing agency in international politics?
The rational actor and the constructivist self constitute the discipline's two archetypal individuals that have implicitly or explicitly informed most accounts of international politics. They provide the starting points for my inquiry. My purpose, however, is to find a model of the actor that can provide a nonindividualist basis for apprehending agency in IR, one that is rid of what Wendt himself called a “rump individualism” that continues to cut across both the rational actor and the constructivist self.Footnote 4 A third model is afforded, I suggest, by the concept of the speaking subject socially embedded in language that lies at the core of discourse theory.Footnote 5 Vis-à-vis constructivism, the issue is one of ontological consistency with regards to its own founding project to open up the inquiry into the mutual constitution of the actors and the structures of international politics. My concern, then, is to find a different basis for a social theory of the international that fully unravels the central constructivist insight that the distinctness of the social world, as opposed to the natural world, lies in the fact that processes of social construction do run, to paraphrase Wendt but where he would not venture, all the way down; that is, right down through the self as well.Footnote 6 While critics of Wendt have extensively exposed the limits of his treatment of identity, what is still lacking, I contend, is an alternative conceptualization of the self that can sustain a genuinely relational social theory of international politics. It is provided by Lacan's “speaking subject.” What is more, its seeds are already sown in the discipline's “starting place,” as Vincent called it, Hobbes's Leviathan.Footnote 7
Engaging with the Hobbesian legacy is important for two reasons. Hobbes's state of nature is traditionally considered the founding myth for the rational actor. It thus provides the starting point for examining IR's historically prior and explicitly individualist model of agency. Yet the critique of these realist and rationalist appropriations of Hobbes, while important, is not new. Hobbes's political myth is important because of what it actually tells us about the individual's makeup. Myths have played a central role in revealing collective unconscious structures and in psychoanalysis's constitution as a body of scientific knowledge. Centering my reading on the Hobbesian state of nature, I show how Hobbes and Lacan proceed down surprisingly similar paths. Strange bedfellows though they may seem at first sight, their theories illuminate one other, the former providing a narrative illustrating the relevance of Lacan's understanding of the structure of the human psyche for political analysis at large; the latter drawing out how Hobbes's formulation of the problem of political order reaches deep into the workings of the individual psyche. Hence in engaging with the Hobbesian legacy in IR my aim is to reveal the speaking subject that lies buried away in IR's founding myth, and to show how it can help to understand agency in international politics.
I introduce the speaking subject as a nonindividualist basis for theorizing international relations by way of a Lacanian reading of Hobbes's Leviathan. The speaking subject provides an alternative to both the rational actor and the constructivist self for laying the foundations of a properly relational social theory of international politics—where the interactions between the social actors and the polity are mutually constitutive all the way through, right down to the actors' core selves. In such a theory, the relationship between the actors is not just a sufficient condition of sociality (something that they might opt in and out of). It is a necessary one because it is founded in a constitutive dependence of the self upon the Other.
The article proceeds in four parts. In the first part I map the history of IR's relationship to Hobbes and trace the emergence of its two archetypal actors, the rational actor and the constructivist self.Footnote 8 I track, first, the appropriation of Hobbes's “natural man” by rationalist scholarship that founded the rational actor, together with efforts by early constructivists and poststructuralists to reclaim IR's founding author away from that school. I also track the decisive move away from Hobbes that yielded the constructivist self as an alternative model of agency to found a social theory of international politics. Shining the recent relationalist scholarship on agency upon this first cut into the discipline's intellectual history then serves to draw out the degrees of individualism that inhere in these two figures of actorhood. These relationist lenses reveal how, despite efforts to elaborate it in social theoretical terms, the constructivist self edges toward the rational actor, and falls short of providing an adequate ontological foundation for a properly social, relational theory of the international.
The Lacanian reading of Hobbes is then deployed in the second and third parts. I show that Hobbes's Leviathan symbolizes what Lacan calls “the Symbolic.” This category comprises a collective and an individual dimension that mark the two levels upon which my reading turns. At the collective level, the Symbolic is the condition of possibility of political order itself. In this reading, then, the Leviathan designates not a particular type of political order, conditioned upon sovereignty, but what makes possible ordered interactions in the first place, whether at the national or international level. For Hobbes that sine qua non, without which there is nothing but chaos, is language. Hence the Hobbesian formulation of the problem of political order that is relevant for theorizing international anarchy is to be found not in the state of nature but toward the other pole of Hobbesian narrative, the symbol of the Leviathan.
At the individual level, the Symbolic is the Other without which the self cannot become a self in the first place—an autonomous, functional member of the polity. It is the psychic instance that “hooks” the individual to the collective. It regulates the individual's relationship to language and the polity. The function that the Leviathan performs at the individual level is akin to that of Lacan's Other. What Hobbes captures in dramatizing “natural man's” contracting with the Leviathan is the moment where the individual enters into the symbolic order, or, to put it differently, where the child learns to speak. This entry, Lacan shows, is marked by a constitutive splitting, by the fundamental loss of a primeval, “natural” (in Hobbes's term) state. Hobbes's political subject, then, prefigures Lacan's split speaking subject. The latter in turn provides the basis for a relational social theory of international politics because it is founded in a constitutive dependence of the self upon the Other.
IR's Prevailing Models of Agency: The Rational Actor and the Constructivist Self
The Leviathan posits the site of the original division of labor between political theory and international relations, which revolves around two related yet distinct clusters of meanings. IR, the discipline that carved out its remit as the relations between states, considers the Leviathan as the state, envisaged from without; whereas political theory appraises the sovereign, envisaged from within.Footnote 9 From there, in IR, questions pertaining to the relationship between the Leviathan and the subject have been largely black-boxed and attention has shifted to the other pole of the narrative; so that the Hobbesian legacy has mostly revolved around the state of nature rather than the figure of the Leviathan. 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 the symbol of the Leviathan will draw out yet another level of meaning, beneath the state or the sovereign, that has to do with the very conditions of possibility of political agency itself.Footnote 10 Before turning to that symbol, I etch out here a schematic history of the discipline under the prism of its relationship to Hobbes in order to trace the ways in which the Hobbesian state of nature has explicitly or implicitly informed theorizations of agency in IR, and specifically its two archetypal agents, the rational actor and the constructivist self. To further expose the theoretical foundations upon which these two figures rest, I draw on the recent theories of agency in the relationism literature, and particularly Emirbayer's typology of paradigms of agency.Footnote 11 This mapping reveals the persistent individualism that, despite their differences, underwrites the rational actor and the constructivist self. Overcoming it will require a third model altogether, the speaking subject.
Hobbes the Realist
Ever since realism first laid claim to Hobbes's state of nature as its founding myth, the history of IR theory has been punctuated by a succession of efforts to recover Hobbes away from the “Hobbesian tradition,” as it has come to be known.Footnote 12 The linchpin to the realist claim is the original analogy drawn in Leviathan between individuals in the state of nature and sovereigns who are seen to stand similarly facing one another “in the posture of gladiators … their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another.”Footnote 13 Upon it hinges the formulation of two founding realist concerns, what drives states to behave as they do, and the problem of international order. Both centrally invoke Hobbes's natural individual. I consider each in turn.
First, Hobbes's “natural man” [sic] lies at the core of the classical realists' quests to find the prime mover of states, namely the desire for power, the sole “moving force” driving the world.Footnote 14 In these realist accounts the wolfish tendencies of Hobbes's natural individual explain the permanent struggle for survival and expansion that characterizes interstate relations. According to Aron, “in the state of nature every entity, whether individual or political unit, makes security a primary objective.”Footnote 15 Yet Aron is not invoking Hobbes's individual per se but rather only half of it, as it were—that belonging to the state of nature. The other half, Hobbes's account of the making of the political subject, is explicitly cast off limits as it is seen as pertaining to the internal workings of the state.
Taking their cue from Hobbes, classical realists thus turned to the individual to explain state behavior. Yet given the multiple accounts of human nature that have succeeded one another in the long history of political thought and their corresponding states of nature (Rousseau's and Locke's notably), why was Hobbes's the one that stuck, for classical realists? The resonance of Hobbes's natural individual owes not (merely) to its somber nature that somehow fits easily with realism's inherent pessimism but to the location of this human-state analogy in the history of political thought. The Hobbesian analogy was seen as the earliest metaphorization of the international as a distinct sphere of political interactions. Hobbes's account of state action by way of individuals played a key role in founding IR as an academic discipline. It carved out not just a distinct object of inquiry (the international), but a style of reasoning. An enduring effect of the Hobbesian legacy, beyond the so-called Hobbesian tradition, was thus to entrench this analogous juxtaposition of the individual and the state as a lasting trope of IR theorizing.Footnote 16
These interacting natural individuals provided the original exemplar for conceptualizing the problem of political order in the absence of centralized authority. As Williams remarks, “the concept of anarchy and the name of Hobbes often seem virtuously synonymous”; and the state of nature was where the synonymy was sealed.Footnote 17 For realists writing against the backdrop of a developing nuclear arms race (to draw here on an array of classical formulations of the problem), “managing peace” in such conditions of anarchy had acquired “an urgency it never had before”; it was thought to be “the problem of the twentieth century.”Footnote 18 Moreover the Cold War, a phrase that was seen to express the quintessence of what “[Hobbes] took to be the permanent relationship of nations,” acutely brought home the relevance of his state of nature to contemporary international politics since, as Gauthier further puts it, “the major nuclear powers share the equality of Hobbesian men [sic]—they can utterly destroy one another.”Footnote 19
Classical realism thus cast its eye upon Hobbes's natural individual and revealed a highly atomized international system of ever-potentially colliding units like billiard balls, to use Wolfers's classical metaphor.Footnote 20
The State of Nature and the E-Rational Individual
The state of nature was a key site for the convergence of realism in IR and rational choice theory in political science. This convergence yielded the strong individualism that characterizes current rationalist traditions, and locked in the utility-maximizing state as IR's unit of analysis.Footnote 21 Insofar as these rationalist readings have played an important part in moving attention away from the role of language and sociality in Hobbes's individual, it is worth considering them at some length.Footnote 22
The Hobbesian state of nature has provided the foundations for theorizing the rational self-interested individual.Footnote 23 Specifically, it is considered the traditional exemplar of the prisoner's dilemma situation.Footnote 24 Extensive work has thus been undertaken to model the behavior of Hobbes's “natural man” [sic] as the archetypal “e-rational” (economically rational) agent, to borrow Neal's expression.Footnote 25 The state of nature, rather than the Leviathan, lies once again in focus, since it showcases the natural individual in a raw, self-interested, utility-maximizing form.Footnote 26
Neal identifies individualism and instrumentalism as two of the theory's core tenets, which he traces directly to Hobbes.Footnote 27 By “individualism” Neal means that “antecedently defined selves” stand prior to all “sociopolitical relations and institutions.”Footnote 28 The individual is therefore the “foundation or independent variable” of rationalist analyses. These individuals or “separate selves,” moreover, “are understood to be rationally self-interested maximizers of utility.”Footnote 29
“Instrumentalism, then,” Neal continues, “must deny that human beings are in any inherent or intrinsic sense social beings.”Footnote 30 Further, “instrumentalism seeks to understand relations in terms of selves, not selves in terms of relations.”Footnote 31 Through these rationalist lenses, set upon the state of nature, Hobbes becomes, by way of his “natural man,” the founder of a “radical individualism,” to use Hampton's expression, that entrenches the individual and the wide gamut of its behavior as the legitimate object of political analysis.Footnote 32
Implications for Agency: The Speechless Self-Action Model
This conception of the individual exemplifies Emirbayer's self-action model of agency.Footnote 33 Emirbayer's typology builds on Dewey and Bentley's analysis of the successive epistemological schemes through which agency has been apprehended throughout the history of scientific inquiry. The first such model, self-action, features preconstituted entities or “things … acting under their own powers.”Footnote 34 In this vein, a strong case for self-action is made, for example, by Gauthier who, taking the route of contractual theory, shows how the social contract necessarily presupposes self-action.Footnote 35 Indeed, how could the social contract hold any worth, if the contracting units do not come together of their own volition or power? In this individualist ontology, self-action is consequently the necessary basis of social agency, hence also the foundation of society. In this individualist ontology:
Individual human beings not only can, but must, be understood apart from society. The fundamental characteristics of men are not products of their social existence … man [sic] is social because he is human, not human because he is social. In particular, self-consciousness and language must be taken as conditions, not products, of society.Footnote 36
It is noteworthy that Hobbes remains once again the key reference point. Building on Gauthier's work, Hampton further elaborates the rationalist self-action model: “Gauthier is right to find in Hobbes's theory a strong brand of individualism, one that regards individual human beings as conceptually prior not only to political society but also to all social interactions.”Footnote 37 An important implication of the rationalist-individualist ontology is the minimal role afforded language. As Gauthier illustrates, language holds no privileged position. It stands on par with all other institutions as one more instrument put to maximizing the interests of an e-rational, quintessentially a-social actor. Here, what the actor says does not matter; or it matters no more than all the other forms of behavior by which the actor furthers its interests. In this sense the actor is speechless. This is the point at which language is evacuated from the rationalist theorization of agency in the rationalist tradition and elided in Hobbes.
Unearthing the Seeds of Sociality and Signification in the State of Nature: Cooperative Talking Gladiators
The state of nature provided the battleground for the initial attempts to recover Hobbes from this individualist ontology and the billiard board model of anarchy it had yielded. The critiques of its “uses and abuses in IR,” as Heller put it, occurred on two successive fronts—the themes of sociality and the role of language.Footnote 38 First, scholars from both IR and political theory extensively underlined the limits Hobbes is careful to set upon his analogy immediately after establishing it.Footnote 39 That Hobbes himself fell short of extending the logic of his solution to the international level was not an oversight but rather indicates his awareness of the differences between that sphere and the state of nature, which has been largely brushed aside as the analogy became increasingly entrenched in realist thought.
Second, with regard to sociality, scholars from the English School tradition sought to reclaim Hobbes as a founder of international society by unearthing the seeds of cooperation within Hobbes's own state of nature.Footnote 40 The point to the other dimensions of Hobbes's “natural man,” beyond human wolfish tendencies, that also govern interactions between Leviathans, emphasizing the “articles of peace” that Hobbes explores in his subsequent chapter, and notably the propensity toward cooperation that emerges from the correct use of reason.Footnote 41 Grounding the prospects for international cooperation within Hobbes's conception of natural law (itself a product of well-wielded reason) thus enables them to reclaim this author for the canon of international law.Footnote 42
The question of language opens up broader epistemological storms around Hobbes that continue to rage in and beyond IR. Against early appropriations of Hobbes as “the protopositivist” by rational choice theorists, to borrow Ball's expression, scholars in the interpretative tradition have emphasized the nominalism in Hobbes that positions him instead as a “thinker acutely aware that social and political reality is linguistically made.”Footnote 43 In IR, this new interest in a proto-constructivist Hobbes in the wake of the reflectivist turn has prompted constructivist and poststructuralist efforts to tease out some linguistic elements in the discipline's founding myth. Kratochwil anchors his inquiry into the normative structures of international politics by way of reference to the norms and rules that inhere in Hobbes's natural state, while Williams considers the “epistemic agreement” that necessarily underpins even the Leviathans' declaring war upon one another, let alone their cooperating.Footnote 44 Both factors center upon language as their primary medium. Among poststructuralists, Hobbes's “discourse of danger” provides the starting point for Campbell's theorizing of identity, albeit to radically depart from it.Footnote 45 To the extent that these more recent reengagements with Hobbes in IR draw out, not merely cooperation and sociality, but the linguistic phenomena at work in the Hobbesian account, my reading is inscribed in their wake. Beyond drawing out disparate linguistic components, however, mine foregrounds the role of language per se as a center point of his theory.
Moving Out of Hobbes's Shadow to Find the State's Self
Notwithstanding these efforts to reclaim Hobbes, the most significant challenge to the rational actor was tabled by the constructivist model of the self. Significantly for the purposes of this article, agency constituted the terrain where the challenge was mounted. Constructivism successfully demonstrated that what remained wanting in the rational actor was an understanding of the very “basis” of its self-interested actions, namely identity.Footnote 46 Because identity was key to throwing the gauntlet at the rationalists, a strong theory of that concept was needed to sustain the challenge. It was provided by Wendt's theory of the “self.”Footnote 47 Insofar as it remains the most complete and authoritative articulation of agency and identity in that scholarship, and given its impact on the discipline, it is my main focus here for revealing the constructivist self, or “Ego” in the Wendtian terminology. My starting point is Wight's engagement with Wendt on the question of agency.
Agency, for Wendt, is a function of certain inherent, “given,” properties of the agent, namely, intentionality and cognition. The actor, for Wendt, is quintessentially a human actor—an actor endowed with the ability to reflect and make decisions—to the degree that “actor” and “agent” become equivalent terms for Wendt.Footnote 48 Wendt's understanding of agency is thus rooted in human consciousness. As Wight demonstrates, this narrowing of agency to its reflexive dimensions ultimately restricts its ability to capture nonhuman agency. Yet doing so is necessary to properly appraise the agency of structures per se, apart from the individuals comprising it; that is, to appraise an agent beyond the individual actor. What Wight's argumentation draws out for our purposes is that it is Wendt's narrow understanding of agency, founded in individual consciousness, that leads him to need a “self” to theorize state agency. This then yields the “states as people” thesis for which, with the individual laid down as the foundation of agency, states can henceforth be appraised “just like” people. As Wight also shows, Wendt falls short of unpacking his notion of “personhood” within properly “corporate” terms; that is, in such a way that corporate agency can be apprehended as something more than a collection or sum of individuals.Footnote 49 In other words, for Wendt, corporate and collective agency are equivalent; whereas for Wight working through their differences (in order to better hone in on corporate agency) is central to deploying a conception of agency suitable for the state.Footnote 50 Taking a step further than Wight, my argument is that doing so is also key to steering clear of the ontological individualism that Wendt ultimately falls back on, because of the particular conception of the self he harbors. I now turn to consider that self by way of a close examination of its derivative, “the essential state,” and the function it performs in laying the foundations for a constructivist model of agency.
Wendt's “essential state” is the linchpin of his efforts to deploy onto the international theories originally developed to appraise individuals. It is constructed by way of reference to a human essence. This essential self is taken to be the seat of a presocial, unconstructed identity, for the individual and the state alike.Footnote 51 Wendt has been extensively taken to task for an essentialist understanding of identity, which ignores alternative conceptualizations.Footnote 52 My aim in this article is to emphasize how this rump essentialism impairs the possibility of developing a constructivist model of agency that provides a genuinely nonindividualist and properly relational alternative to the rational actor. I show that the essential state leads Wendt instead to fall back onto what I would call an inadvertent individualism, by which I mean an atomized ontology for which self-other relations remain secondary rather than constitutive of the self.
Implications for Agency: Unchanging Speechless Inter-Action
In the Wendtian project the essential state sets up a bulwark against the theorizing that Wendt's efforts serve to perfect. Wendt is explicit about not wanting to unravel the constructivist logic “all the way down” and about the importance of holding on to a middle-ground “rump materialism.”Footnote 53 To this end, toward the beginning of the second part of his opus, he engages in a series of line-drawing moves to contain the very constructivist logic that he successfully deployed throughout the first part. The essential state, buttressed by way of reference to the physical body, constitutes the site where such line-drawing occurs.Footnote 54
With identity thus firmly grounded in a core self, the Wendtian state, or “Ego,” enters fully formed into interactions with an “Alter.” The constructivist self corresponds to Emirbayer's second model of agency, inter-action. Here “entities no longer generate their own action, but rather the relevant action takes place among the entities themselves.”Footnote 55 In Dewey and Bentley's original chronology, the first model of agency (self-action) took shape in the context of appraising natural phenomena (such as gravity), while the second one emerged to be able to appraise the specificities of the social world.Footnote 56 This mirrors the evolution from rationalist to reflectivist epistemologies in IR. For the theories of agency explicitly centered on the social rather than the natural world, such as constructivism, the central question becomes what part do the interactions between the units play in constituting the units themselves; or to what extent should these interactions be foregrounded in theorizing the units and their agency? Rephrased again differently, the key question becomes whether these interactions are essential or merely secondary to the making of social actors.
With his essential state, Wendt settles the question in a direction quite different from that upon which he had initially set out. The essential state serves to cordon off a primary self from constructivist dynamics. By the same token it also establishes self-other interactions as secondary and thus, ultimately, as exogenous to the formation of the self—at least at its core. This ultimately defeats Wendt's original intention to show that “the identities and interests of purposive actors are constructed” since their core remains given, just as in the rationalist model.Footnote 57
Doing so requires a third model of agency that does not shy away from appraising the ways in which the interactions between the actors not only affect but actually constitute them all the way down, which Emirbayer terms trans-action. Having developed his typology, Emirbayer shows that the substantive line of divide between the different paradigms of agency runs in fact between essentialist (or “substantialist” in his term) ones, which include both the self-action and inter-action models, and relational ones, such as the trans-action model, tabled, but not quite fleshed out, by his “Manifesto.” Importantly, Emirbayer emphasizes that the inter-action model is “only apparently the chief rival to rational choice models” because “entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such interaction, each independent of the existence of the other, much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtownian mechanics.”Footnote 58 Jackson and Nexon further underscore the “illusion of agency” perpetuated by constructivism in IR.Footnote 59 In their analysis:
While it might seem credible that inter-action has agents—after all, it posits concrete, self-organizing entities that inter-act to produce outcomes—so called agents at the heart of inter-actionism do not act at all. It is variables—attributes of entities—that do that acting.Footnote 60
In the Wendtian framework, for example, such variables would comprise the roles of enemy, rival, or friend that a preconstituted Ego would take up upon entering into interactions with an Alter, according to the broader cultures of anarchy in which the two states are embedded (Hobbesian, Lockean, or Kantian respectively).
Two important implications stem from here regarding the question of change and the role of language. First, this unchanging core self sits uneasily with constructivism's founding promise to better explain change than rationalism can, which in turn hinged on its ability to appraise the constitution of the actor's identities and interests. The social theorist Abbot captures the challenge in these terms:
Social theories that presume fixed, given entities—rational choice being the obvious example—always fall apart over the problem of explaining change in those entities, a problem rational choice handles by ultimately falling back on biological individuals, whom it presumes to have a static, given character.Footnote 61
Wendt's reverting to the biological body to ground the state's self is significant in this regard.Footnote 62 Abbot further unpacks the problem by positing that “[in order to explain change], we must begin with it and hope to explain stasis—even the stable entity that is human personality—as a byproduct.”Footnote 63 Short of being able to do so, one is left with “social ontology that by making stasis primary loses its ability to explain change.”Footnote 64 The essential state locates Wendt's social theory in this type of ontology.
Second, language, the primary medium of social construction, is also removed from the realm of the core self. This marks the point in the elaboration of the constructivist self where language and signification are cleft from considerations about identity formation—the point where, as Drulak puts it, Wendt “forgets about the contribution of language”Footnote 65 and breaks with the linguistic sensibilities that had marked early constructivist IR theory.Footnote 66 If language is a social construct, whereas the core self is given, then, at its core, language is nonessential to the formation of identity.
This middle-ground constructivist self, grounded in an essential core, ultimately takes the bite out of the founding constructivist insight into the co-constitution of the actors and the structures. It ultimately short-circuits the possibility of founding a relational social theory of international politics. While Wendt does not explicitly set out to find a relational ontology and thus, on some level, cannot be taken to task on this score, the structurationist theorizing under whose aegis Wendt places his efforts is fundamentally relational, in that it emphasizes the complex interactions and the feedback loops circuiting between the social actors and the structures.Footnote 67 Yet by excising an essential self from these structurationist dynamics, Wendt elides a key dimension of this relationality. Developing a social theory that fully draws out the ways in which the actors' selves and the structures mutually constitute one another requires eschewing this individualistic starting point altogether. It requires enquiring into dynamics of social construction that do run all the way down, and reintegrating the role of language in the making of the self. It is in search of such a possibility that we now turn to Lacan and return to Hobbes.
The Symbol-Leviathan as Signifier of the Symbolic: The Collective Level
In coining the Leviathan, what Hobbes conjures is none other than the Lacanian Symbolic—the symbol symbolizes the Symbolic. Although a complete exposition of Lacan's complex thought is beyond the scope of this article,Footnote 68 a few remarks are useful to contextualize the concept. As a practicing clinician, Lacan had his sights set upon the individual or rather “the subject.” The two key features of the Lacanian subject are first, that it is a subject of language—a speaking subject—and second, that it is inherently divided—a split subject—between conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. In the wake of Freud's discovery, the central task of psychoanalytic theorizing has been to unearth the deep structures of the unconscious. The unconscious significantly expands, or rather profoundly shakes up, our understanding of the sources of human agency. It ushers in the realization that an entire dimension of motivations and interests remain constitutively inaccessible to the actor's consciousness; that actors are also “acted upon” by motives that are theirs yet elude them—that, to paraphrase Freud, we are not masters in our own dwelling places.
Lacan's key contribution to the psychoanalytic enterprise was to draw out the efficacies of language. For Lacan, as for Hobbes, speech—our ability to signify, to make meaning—is what constitutes us as political animals, and thus the primary social bond. In Hobbes's words: “the most notable inventions of all was that of speech … without which, there had been amongst men neither common wealth, no society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears or wolves.”Footnote 69 That human beings are first and foremost creatures of language entails that they are structured by language. That is, language provides the basic organizing principle of collective life, but also, and this is Lacan's key finding, of the unconscious as well.
“The Symbolic” is this realm of language, of the collective, with which the subject is constantly contending. The concept's purchase for political analysis is twofold. The first is its location at the nexus of the individual and the collective. At the individual level, the “Symbolic” is a clinical term designating one of three categories of the subject's experience (of the subject's “reality”); alongside the Imaginary (schematically, the realm of preverbal identifications) and the Real (that which cannot be put into words).Footnote 70 Grossly simplified, the Symbolic is the place within the subject where the subject connects (or fails to connect) to the collective. At the collective level, the symbolic order is not simply the political order; it designates something more foundational, namely the conditions of possibility of organized life. The concept's second key advantage over other forms of theorization of the political is the depth and breadth of its writ.Footnote 71 The conceptual space in which we are operating here is the “deepest stratum” of political ontology, to borrow the expression that Blits uses to point to the level where fear is at work in the Hobbesian ontology (as opposed to the “political level” to which it tends to be reduced in the wake of Rousseau's critique of Hobbes).Footnote 72 Thus, to string out the spatialization, the Symbolic designates a liminal space below or beneath the polity. It evokes a manner of underlying matrix that underpins the possibility of collective life in the first place.
I develop my Lacanian reading of Hobbes in two movements that reflect these two aspects of the Symbolic. I analyze the function performed by the Leviathan at the collective level first before considering it at the individual level in the next section. First I show how, in Hobbes's political treatise the Leviathan operates as the signifier of the Symbolic, by way of two different theories of language, that of Lacan and speech act theory. Starting in the state of nature, my argument follows the movement of the Hobbesian narrative, which is one of entry into socialization.
The State of Nature, Where the Sound and Fury Signify Nothing: Hobbes's Empty Signifiers
Hobbes's theory of signification, nicely dubbed by Watkins his “humpty dumpty theory of meaning,” is key to appraising his moral philosophy.Footnote 73 At its core lies an inherent disconnect between the signifier and signified, or words and their meaning. In the state of nature, which “consists in a multitude of humpty dumpties,” words mean only what the utterer intends them to.Footnote 74 Consider the following well-known evocation of the natural state from Leviathan:
But whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of man, where there is not commonwealth; or, in a commonwealth, from the person that representeth it.Footnote 75
Considering the state of nature here, with Williams, “not [as] an actual condition” but rather as “an intellectual construct [that seeks] to explicate the basic elements of human action,” this passage reveals the centrality of language to Hobbes's ontology.Footnote 76 What it starkly illuminates is that signifiers, for Hobbes, are “naturally” empty. They do not hold any inherent meaning. In the state of nature words are appropriated by individuals for whatever suits their purpose. Nothing fixes moral predicates, such as “good,” to a set of commonly accepted meanings of what constitutes “the good.” That is precisely the role of the Leviathan.
In the Hobbesian thought experiment the state of nature is the liminal place that precedes social construction. In this, it is of key interest to constructivist theorizing. In this passage the state of nature is revealed, in the strongest possible sense, as a space of meaninglessness. Humans cannot understand each other since the same words hold different meanings for every person. While there are utterances (indeed Hobbes's “natural man” speaks), there is no language, in the sense of a collective, transmittable sets of meaning that can provide the basis of a common understanding. Consequently no collective action is possible. In the state of nature there is only sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This meaningless or topsy-turvyism is also what constitutes the most robust objection to taking the state of nature at face value as the founding paradigm for appraising the space of interstate relations. Tempting though the image may be, that space is not quite populated by “a multitude of humpty dumpties”; and history has provided sufficient evidence of successful collective action between states, as amply emphasized by the English School. In international anarchy, then, language and meaning still obtain. That is, despite the multiplicity of languages, the possibility, if not always the actuality, of a common understanding still remains.
What the state of nature represents, then, is the solipsistic world of the infant—etymologically the prespeaking being (in-fans).Footnote 77 The condition that Hobbes evokes, I suggest, is that of the infant. I will show that the Hobbesian individual is much closer to the speechless and utterly vulnerable infant than to the aggressive gladiator fully in possession of his weapons that IR chose to focus on.
The Leviathan as the “Quilting Point” Fastening the Social Order
This inherently loose relation between the signifier and signified dramatized in Hobbesian myth is the hallmark of the “floating signifier,” a defining concept of the linguistic turn in contemporary political thought. It is also what marks Hobbes as the “precursor” to a turn that occurred, in Ball's words, “almost as an instance of uncoordinated simultaneous discovery” in the social science and humanities at large, constructivism being its offshoot in IR.Footnote 78 The floating signifier captured the shattering of the correspondence theory of truth, whereby words were seen to no longer simply mirror the world, but indeed to partially constitute it. That the signifier “floats” expresses simply that meaning does not inhere in it, since meaning is a matter of social convention, and different languages feature different signifiers for the same signified. The signifier, per se, is empty. Signification, then, or the making of meaning, is the tying together of a signifier and a signifier within a broader signifying system, or language.Footnote 79
The fixing of meaning or the “filling” of an inherently empty signifier is the primary process of social construction. Understanding the workings of language, then, is crucially relevant to constructivist theorizing because it illuminates the how of social construction.Footnote 80 This is the main motivation for finding ways to bring the centrality of language to bear on political analysis.Footnote 81 What the linguistic tradition has underscored more starkly than other forms of constructivist theorizing is not merely the contingency (or historicity) of social constructs, but that this contingency itself owes to the unfixity of meaning as the base condition underlying processes of social construction.
The floating signifier is also the center point of Lacan's conception of language.Footnote 82 With unfixity as his starting point, a key concern was to capture how the signifier is fastened together with a signified in speech. For Lacan, this “floating” or constant slippage between the level of the signifier and that of the signified is temporarily arrested by what he calls “quilting points” (points de capiton), or (literally) upholstery buttons.Footnote 83 While Lacan coined the concept to analyze the individual's discourse, the concept was developed in his wake to analyze political discourses at large.Footnote 84 Quilting points are key signifiers in the discourse of the “normal” (nonpsychotic) subject that function as anchoring points where signifiers and signifieds are knotted together. The analogy here is that the upholstery button is a place where the mattress-maker's needle has worked to prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from shifting about. The button links the two outer edges of the mattress, which evoke these two levels involved in signification. Stringing out the analogy, just like the lines radiating from the upholstery button on the mattress's surface, the quilting point captures the idea of an organizing point running through broader discourses, a form of overarching referent for multiple individual utterances, which Lacan then proceeds to flesh out with his concept of the “master signifier.”Footnote 85 The master signifier is thus a key signifier that unifies a discursive field, fixing the meaning of often open-ended or contested concepts. For example Žižek shows how, under communism, certain signifiers, such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “the state,” acquired a particular meaning when “quilted” by the master signifier or point de capiton “communism.”Footnote 86 The same words rang quite differently in the West where they were “quilted” otherwise.
These signifiers, however, designate a political order, not the order underlying the possibility of politics itself. This is precisely what Hobbes nailed with the symbol-Leviathan. What the signifier-Leviathan conjures, then, is the Symbolic per se. It is an open-ended signifier that necessarily eludes all attempts to pin it down to a set of signifieds, because it operates as the master signifier that designates the Symbolic at large.Footnote 87 Just as the “quilting point” is the point at which a signifier is knotted to the otherwise indeterminate and floating signifieds, the Leviathan is the instance that fastens the otherwise ever-shifting and always relative meaning of “good” to a fixed, objective, and commonly agreed-upon set of understandings about what constitutes the good.
Centrally, Hobbes's theory of signification developed two chapters earlier carries this dimension beyond moral predicates alone. His description of the natural state thus needs to be read against his insistence on the “necessity of definitions.”Footnote 88 This fastening together of signifiers and signifieds is a precondition for language to be able to function as the effective social bond that can contain the threat of disorder suffusing the natural state. The Leviathan is this fastening instance.
This enables us to revisit in a new light the notorious description of the state of nature in Leviathan:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by the sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [sic], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.Footnote 89
The grammatical negative functions here, to draw on a metaphor from analogue photography, as the negative vis-à-vis the silver print. The final picture of the state of nature captures, exactly inverted, the key components of the symbolic order. Hobbes is careful to include here the major cardinal points undergirding social life: markers of time and space; the possibility of cultivating the earth (and indeed all cultural productions); the possibility of knowledge, and in fact, all peaceful interactions (including at the international level). The Leviathan, in turn, is the center point of that symbolic order. It both refers to (signifies) and makes possible the Symbolic order itself. It is the master signifier that guarantees the possibility of all signification.
The Leviathan's Performativity
The performativity of the symbol-Leviathan can also be illuminated from within speech act theory. It operates on two different levels: first, on the level of what Hobbes achieved, and second, in terms of what the symbol achieves. The first pertains to Hobbes's historical location at a juncture where theorizing was directly efficacious as in few areas of contemporary public life. Standing on the verge of a civil order that was coming undone, Hobbes's poietic act consisted in creating a symbol that could conjure up a unified polity as the horizon for political action. That the symbol still remains common currency for evoking the British Commonwealth is a testimony to the success of Hobbes's foundational act.Footnote 90
As for the second, Watkins has underlined the ways in which speech and action are co-extensive in the figure of the Leviathan. “In declaring something to be right or wrong, a sovereign is not describing it or making a statement about it. His declaration is, to use Austin's term, a ‘performative.’”Footnote 91 The function of the Leviathan, in other words, is not merely one of revealing a preexisting natural or divine order (as in correspondence theory of the world), but of actual constitution. There are thus two parallel levels of constitution at play. Hobbes's sovereigns actually “make the things they command [sic].”Footnote 92 The Leviathan makes the social order itself: that which makes possible language and all ulterior conventions.
Taking this line of argument beyond Watkins and indeed Austin himself, the type of performative power implied in the sovereign speech act could be said to be ‘pre-locutionary’. It is not simply an act supported by social conventions, as in illocutionary acts (such as the judge who pronounces a sentence). Rather, it makes all social conventions possible in the first place. It is also therefore what enables perlocutionary acts to take effect, to name the other main speech act under examination in speech act theory (acts that operate by way of consequence rather than conventions per se, such as offending someone by insulting them). Watkins, whose argument centers on the act of naming, compares the Leviathan's speech act to that of the clergyman who christens a child. Remarkably, in a Lacanian perspective, the act of naming is precisely what inscribes the child into the symbolic order. This initial inscription (performed by a clergyman or not) is what makes social existence possible for the individual, as we will see. However Watkin's clergyman operates on the conventions of an already existing symbolic order. What the Leviathan does is name the symbolic order into existence. Thus, far ahead of Lacan, in coining the symbol Hobbes names the instance that makes all naming possible. In sum, the Leviathan is the signifier that makes all signification possible.
The Leviathan as the Master Signifier That Enables Signification: The Individual Level
At the collective level, the Leviathan functions as the master signifier that designates the symbolic order, hence the very possibility of human collectives existing in the first place. The second movement of my argument hinges on the Leviathan's function at the individual level. A key problem for Hobbes was to ground the relationship between the individual and the sovereign within the subject, in order to explain the subject's entry into the social contract as an internal necessity, as Gauthier had correctly sensed. As Foucault underscores:
What, indeed, was the sovereign … for Hobbes? … [It was] the instance capable of saying no to the individual's desiderata; the problem then being how this “no” … could be legitimate and founded in this individual's very own will.Footnote 93
The Lacanian framework reveals the extent to which Hobbes achieves exactly that, in ways that reach far beyond what Foucault himself gauged. Doing so rests on the second dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic, which designates, for the individual, the order of the Other. The term Lacan coins to circumscribe this function of the Other at the individual level is the “Name of the Father.” Here I show that the Leviathan corresponds to the Lacanian “Name of the Father,” that is, the instance that connects the individual to the collective. The individual's perspective (the perspective of “natural man”) thus reveals how the Leviathan operates as that which fastens together the individual and collective levels.
The Leviathan as the Other
The Symbolic, for the individual, is the order of the Other. The moment when the individual acquires a name marks its birth as a social, symbolic being. The order into which the individual is thus hailed by being “named into” it, is initially fundamentally alien to the speechless infant. The words that the infant learns belong, quite literally, to a foreign world—an order that preexists it and where these words already hold given meanings. To learn to speak is to step into this alien order. The Symbolic is that world. It designates the place of the Other, constituting both the reservoir of preexisting signifiers (its “treasure chest”)Footnote 94 and the original addressee, the person with whom the infant first interacts, and with whom it learns eventually how to speak (the figure of the (m)other). This foundational exchange determines the basic structure of signification. Subsequently, to speak is only ever to draw upon preexisting signifiers (first aspect of the Other) to convey meaning to an addressee (second aspect of the Other). To draw upon, or better said in a Lacanian sense to borrow: becoming a social animal rests on a “Great Debt.”Footnote 95 This is the symbolic debt that one incurs in borrowing signifiers from the Other in order to be understood, and therefore to be acknowledged as belonging to that order. Lacan emphasizes the mythical origin of the “symbol” as both “a gift” and a “pact” that all at once indebts and binds together those who receive it (the Argonauts in his example), creating the basic social bond.Footnote 96
What, then, underwrites this debt, and whence does it draw its power? This “stepping into” the Symbolic is not merely the acquisition of a positive, distinctly human, neurological capacity of speech.Footnote 97 To the contrary, what Lacan draws out is that the entry into the Symbolic is premised on a constitutive loss. Alienation within the symbolic order is a basic condition of one's becoming a social speaking being. Lacan captures this foundational loss, or lack, with the concept of castration. To be clear, it has nothing to do with the physical act of mutilation; we are here squarely within the realm of the Symbolic rather than the Real. In fact, castration is the concept that centrally underpins that realm. It captures the original forsaking that each of us undergoes in order to accede to language.Footnote 98
Subsequently, however, we forever uncomfortably straddle these two realms, the realm of immediate, preverbal experience (the world of raw needs, impulses, frustrations, anger, and joy, of the Imaginary and the Real); and the mediated realm of the Symbolic, into which we must first be integrated in order to express that experience. But to be able to express it is also to lose it in its raw, immediate form. Herein lies the constitutive split that marks the tragedy of the human condition. Words can never completely convey exactly what the speaker wants to say. For anything to be said requires that it be mediated by words that belong to everyone, words that hold generic meanings and are thus fundamentally ill-fitted for that unique and immediate impulse that led the subject to want to speak in the first place. As Lacan put it in his famous quips, “the thing must be lost in order to be expressed,” or again “speech is the murder of the thing.”Footnote 99 The “thing” in its original, raw individualized form must be relinquished so as to be fitted into existing signifiers and thereby communicated. This forsaking is a condition of entry into the Symbolic. It is what one gives up in order to be able to become a social, speaking being. “Man [sic] speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man.”Footnote 100
The Social Contract as Castration and the Leviathan as the “Name of the Father”
This symbolic debt casts a new light on the depths that Hobbes plumbs with his understanding of the psychic mechanisms underpinning the social contract. First, in contracting with the Leviathan, the individual forsakes liberty in exchange for securing life and, centrally, being rid of the fear of death. That fundamental freedom, I argue, pertains to the realm of immediate experience and unimpeded desires. Hobbes's “natural man” is the being that does exactly as it pleases, takes exactly what it wants, calling whatever suits its momentary appetite “good” and whatever displeases it, “evil.” It wanders without any moral compass, its wants unhindered. What Hobbes offers, I suggest, is in fact a fantasmatic representation of the preverbal individual prior to its encounter with the Symbolic and to castration taking hold. Hobbes's state of nature is an apt rendition of the world of Lacan's infant who, unaware of its limit, experiences itself as all-powerful. Its primordial liberty is what is “lost” in order to enter the social order. Centrally, however, it is also a fantasmatic liberty, an expression of this illusion of omnipotence. Seen in this light, what Hobbes draws out perhaps more than any other social contract theorist is the extreme vulnerability that “natural man” finds itself in, which drives it to entering the contract with the Leviathan. That fear of death is a foundational fear. Its constitutive role is akin to that of the slave in Hegel's master-slave relationship.Footnote 101 It is not just the fear of dying after having lived a free life. It is the fear of not being able to live in the first place, to establish oneself as an autonomous self.
In this light, then, in the contract passed between the individual and the Leviathan, the Leviathan is, much more fundamentally than has been recognized, the Other upon whom the self constitutively depends to acquire the means to become itself. That contract institutes not merely the monarch's subject, not merely the political subject (or the subject of a certain kind of political order). Rather, it founds the speaking subject itself, which is also always split. It constitutes the individual qua political animal. This is the true meaning of that symbolic pact: it is an exchange of the freedom to do however one pleases against language and the ability to act politically. It is underwritten, and herein lies Hobbes's Lacanian insight, by a symbol, the Leviathan.
In Lacanian thought, one signifier in particular performs a similar function, “the Name of the Father.”Footnote 102 Lacan elaborates the concept in the same seminar where he coins the notion of “quilting point.”Footnote 103 He realizes that there is a signifier more fundamental still, one that “holds no signifier.”Footnote 104 This is properly the master signifier, or “pure signifier” as Juranville captures it, in that it attaches to no particular signified, and instead encompasses them all. It is the instance that underwrites all other signifiers, all chains of signification.Footnote 105 It is what makes meaning possible in the first place.
The father is the instance that triangulates the mother-child relationship and opens it up to the Symbolic.Footnote 106 The father ruptures the original mother-child symbiosis. This constitutes an essential loss; but it is also what ushers the child into the symbolic order and thereby institutes the possibility of symbolizing, of speaking. Subsequently, this instance detaches from the actual father in this primordial configuration, and becomes the Other that supports all social relationships, all possibility of interaction between a “self” and an “other”—hence why it is a signifier, “the Name of the Father.” It is the signifier that designates the order of Other and, in doing so, underwrites the possibility of signification itself. In Hobbes's world that signifier is none other than the Leviathan, the instance that makes possible interactions and common understandings.
The Speaking Subject: Conclusions for IR Theory
Reading Hobbes through Lacan shines a dramatically different light upon the individual that has stood in the discipline's sights ever since it turned to Hobbes's 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 the unit's selves (in constructivism). It restores the second half of the Hobbesian individual obscured by IR's gaze having being cast 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 Hobbes's 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's full picture and the Leviathan back in sight, that unit is not a discrete, self-contained entity or billiard ball; nor does it consequently yield an atomistic billiard board of utility-maximizing units—whether colliding or rolling in the same direction.
This individualist conception of the individual, for which Hobbes's “natural man” was first marshaled 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 his natural individual's behavior.Footnote 107 This fear is indeed what drives the individual, and subsequently for realism, states, to seek security as their primary objective, to echo Aron's words.Footnote 108 But, centrally, 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 sight makes little sense. What is to be found there, a Lacanian reading reveals, is a wordless infant, a naked being stripped of the trappings of agency. It is a pre-actor, whose life would be very short indeed. For its part, the rational actor, an actor presumably equipped with the means to act—who can 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 “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 is always already a social being who does not exist outside of its constitutive relation to the Leviathan-Other. It is, in Hobbes's dramatization, simply crushed by the dangers lurking in the state of nature.
The Split, Desiring, Speaking Subject
Finding a new basis for elaborating human agency first requires restoring these two halves to Hobbes's individual, his natural individual and his political subject. The picture thus emerging overlies Lacan's subject, on three central points. First, it reveals an individual constitutively 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 split speaking subject forever straddles these two realms, one foot in either.
That tension, second, is the motor of human desire. Lacan's and Hobbes's theories of agency both centrally foreground the role of desire as the dynamic component of the human psyche. Desire, in Lacan as in 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 its half. Hobbes's desire for power that so captured the imagination of the discipline's founding fathers is a desire to secure the means of one's agency. It is a desire for potency, rather than for the material power IR has tended to focus on.Footnote 109 The splitting, dramatized in Hobbes by leaving the state of nature and contracting with the Leviathan, constitutes the individual's desire and the individual's ability to act in the social world. Working with the Hobbesian myth, leaving the state of nature is in fact the very first expression of that desire. Desire is what drives the individual to step into sociality and language for the means to express it, and to obtain what the individual wants. This desire to want to know how to speak (and the frustrations of not quite yet knowing how to) is a tangible feature in a child.
The split desiring subject is therefore also, third, a speaking subject, an actor who does things with words, to paraphrase Austin's seminal work. What Lacan's theory draws out, however, is the extent to which that actor, acting in words, is equally embedded in sociolinguistic structures that act upon the actor, in accordance with a structurationist social theory.
Toward a New Social Theory of International Politics
The split speaking subject thus provides the ontological basis for deploying a structurationist and properly transactional social theory of international politics where the mutual constitution of the actors and the structures runs, this time, all the way down. Because deploying such a theory in full is not possible within the space of one article, my primary concern has been simply to lay a first cornerstone, with a new model of agency to be found in the Lacanian figure of the split speaking subject. With it, however, four features of what such a social theory may look like begin to take shape.
First, a relational social theory of international politics foregrounds front and center the foundational dependence of the self upon the Other, instead of reverting to an individualist atomistic ontology that posits an autonomous, sovereign “Ego” interacting with a discrete “Alter” as in the Wendtian social theory.Footnote 110 What grounds this relationality, and prevents it from such slippage, is that it is revealed as an ontological dependency, not merely as a secondary, contingent relation. It is the foundational dependence that makes the self in the first place, and subsequently remains an ongoing feature of political order. This Lacanian reading of Hobbes thus drastically revisits constructivism's defining concern with constitution and with identity.
Second, the speaking subject paves the way for a social theory that shifts the focus away from interests to desire as the basis for human agency. The speaking subject brings new depths to the founding constructivist insight underpinning its conception of agency, namely, that understanding actors' identities is central to appraising their interests, since the actor's understanding of its interests is a function of its self-understanding. As a key implication of this insight, constructivists have rightly emphasized the extent to which an actor's interests are not self-explicit or automatically given, insofar as they are read through its identities. The speaking subject illuminates the ontological basis for this opacity. It is not merely that its interests are not fully transparent to the actor in that they are bound up with its identity. It is that identity itself is not fully accessible to the actor, since the self is constitutively split between conscious and unconscious dimensions. The split subject significantly dents conceptions of the autonomous actor who knows and does what it wants. Bearing out this realization draws out the restrictions that have been placed by conceiving agency within the terms of interests alone. It paves the way for the more productive category of desire as the foundation for human action.
Third, refounding a social theory upon the speaking subject opens up the category of “structure” itself. The linguistic Lacanian ontology presents a new type of structure altogether, alongside the objective social structures shaped by actors' interactions that are habitually considered by social theoretical IR. Lacan tables a deeply intersubjective structure that is also a key driver of action, the unconscious. As that side of the subject that has been constitutively “split off” from the actor's consciousness, this is what eludes at first-hand the actor's knowledge of the actor's intentions and motivations. Lacan's central theoretical contribution was to uncover the parallel functioning of the unconscious and of language, the primary medium of social construction. In this it is centrally relevant to the constructivist concern with the social construction of institutions and identities. Language provides a way of accessing this whole other source of human agency, alongside conscious, intentional action. Language and the unconscious would thus constitute two additional structural foci for a Lacanian relational social theory.
The fourth implication is methodological. The speaking subject shores up the theoretical foundations for the discursive study of international politics. Elsewhere I have shown that the methodological added-value of the concept of speaking subject for empirical scholarship is that it allows the analysis to travel the levels of analyses implicated in IR, from the state to the individual. Apprehending the actor as a speaking subject suspends the ontological a priori as to who constitutes the actors of international politics, thereby moving the analysis beyond IR's characteristic state centrism.Footnote 111 The speaking subject is the actor located at the place of I/We in a discourse. That talking actor may be an individual, a state, or indeed a nongovernmental organization, according to the case at hand.Footnote 112 Discourse thus provides a more theoretically parsimonious way of studying identity than the constructivist self, because it holds no presumptions about the actor's selves. What I hope to have added in this article to this theoretical edifice is to illuminate who that self might actually be—and to show that it was always there, buried away in our Hobbesian legacy. It is a split, desiring, speaking, political subject.
