¹ Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943)Google Scholar .

² Charlotte Epstein, Thomas Lindemann, and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns: the agency that makes the world go around’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), introduction to the Special Issue.

³ Importantly, a structure is not an essence: structures can be unstable and motile, and such structures are at the heart of poststructuralist thought, as I have shown elsewhere. See Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations: Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 499–519; Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake: the rational actor, the self or the speaking subject?’, International Organization, 67:2 (2013), pp. 287–361 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Hence to seek to uncover the structures that account for human action is not to seek to fix them to a human essence – it is not an essentialising move.

⁴ This foregrounding of the place of desire in international politics builds on my earlier work; see notably Epstein, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake’, and Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2011), pp. 327–350 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁵ Oliver, Kelly, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)Google Scholar .

⁶ See, for example, Glynos, Jason, ‘The grip of ideology: a Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 6:2 (2001), pp. 191–214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Glynos, Jason and Stavrakakis, Yannis, ‘Lacan and political subjectivity: Fantasy and enjoyment in psychoanalysis and political theory’, Subjectivity, 24:1 (2008), pp. 256–274 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ;

and for its application in Badredine Arfi, IR, ‘Fantasy in the discourse of social theory of international politics’, Cooperation and Conflict, 45:4 (2010), pp. 428–448 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁷ This is a non-essentialist substrate, because, as we will see, it is constantly in (re)construction.

⁸ Taylor, Charles, ‘The politics of recognition’, in Gutmann, Amy (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁹ Povinelli, Elizabeth A., The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹⁰ Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992)Google Scholar .

¹¹ See Zehfuss, Maja, ‘Constructivism and identity: a dangerous liaison’, European Journal of International Relations, 7:3 (2001), pp. 315–348 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Epstein, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations’; Epstein, ‘Who speaks?’.

¹² Honneth, Axel, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 143 Google Scholar .

¹³ Ibid., p. 133.

¹⁴ Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Stop telling us how to behave: Socialization or infantilization?’, International Studies Perspectives, 13:2 (2012), pp. 135–145 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹⁵ Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 133–4.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 134.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 139.

¹⁸ Fraser, Nancy, ‘Rethinking recognition’, New Left Review, 3 (2000), pp. 107–120 Google Scholar .

¹⁹ Fraser, Nancyand Honneth, Axel, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London and New York: Verso, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

²⁰ Thomas Lindemann, ‘Agency (mis)recognition in international violence: the case of French jihadism’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), this Special Issue; Minda Holm and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘States before relations: On misrecognition and the bifurcated regime of sovereignty’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), this Special Issue.

²¹ McNay, Lois, Against Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 2008)Google Scholar .

²² Ibid., p. 165.

²³ Ibid., p. 195.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 196.

²⁵ Pippin, Robert B., ‘Reconstructivism: On Honneth’s Hegelianism’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 40:8 (2014), p. 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ See Honneth, Axel, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 2012)Google Scholar . Hence Honneth does expand his scope to the Phenomenology in subsequent work. Pippin’s ‘Reconstructivism’ critique, however, remains valid, insofar as it concerns the relationship between reason and freedom, and how these are impacted by Honneth’s ‘post-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel.

²⁸ Pippin, ‘Reconstructivism’, p. 13.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Markell, Patchen, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar .

³¹ McNay, Against Recognition.

³² Taylor, ‘The politics of recognition’.

³³ Markell, Bound by Recognition, p. 18.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 21.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 62.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 12.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 13.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 12.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 22.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 60, emphasis in original.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 22.

⁴² Ibid., p. 15.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 10–11, emphasis in original.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 22.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 11.

⁴⁶ See Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns’.

⁴⁷ Markell, Bound by Recognition, p. 14.

⁴⁸ Oliver, Witnessing. See also McNay, Against Recognition.

⁴⁹ Comay, Rebecca, ‘Resistance and repetition: Freud and Hegel’, Research in Phenomenology, 45:2 (2015), pp. 237–266 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁵⁰ Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar .

⁵¹ Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, & the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988)Google Scholar ; Benjamin, Jessica, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar .

⁵² Oliver, Witnessing, p. 5.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 2.

⁵⁴ Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 99.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 99.

⁵⁶ See, for example, ibid., p. 96.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 106.

⁵⁸ Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject (New York: Other Press 2002)Google Scholar .

⁵⁹ Hass, Andrew, Hegel and the Art of Negation: Negativity, Creativity and Contemporary Thought (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), p. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁶⁰ Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)Google Scholar .

⁶¹ Forbes, Duncan, ‘Introduction’, in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. x Google Scholar . As we hope to have shown in our introduction, this third moment is what side-tracked Hegel into generalisations about a so-called ‘world history’ that have not merely been proven entirely misguided by history itself (or histories), but that are also shot through with problematic constructions of race (see Camara, Babacar, ‘The falsity of Hegel’s theses on Africa’, Journal of Black Studies, 36:1 (2005), pp. 82–96)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁶² See Epstein, Charlotte (ed.), Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Epstein, Charlotte, ‘The postcolonial perspective: an introduction’, International Theory, 6:2 (2014), pp. 294–311 Google Scholar .

⁶³ Noys, Benjamin, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁶⁴ The seal of the negative is on most of Nietzsche’s writings, but, see, for example, So Spake Zarathustra (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift, 1999).

⁶⁵ Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)Google Scholar ; Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (London: Zone Books, 1988)Google Scholar ; Bataille, Georges, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986)Google Scholar ; Green, André, Le travail du négatif (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2011)Google Scholar , my translation.

⁶⁶ See Green, Le travail du négatif.

⁶⁷ Coole, Diana, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar ; Žižek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar ; Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar ; Žižek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012)Google Scholar ; Noys, The Persistence of the Negative; Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar ; Comay, ‘Resistance and repetition’; Hass, Hegel and the Art of Negation; John McCumber, ‘The temporal turn in German idealism: Hegel and after’, Research in Phenomenology, 32:1 (2002), pp. 44–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁶⁸ Hass, Hegel and the Art of Negation.

⁶⁹ Comay, ‘Resistance and repetition’.

⁷⁰ McCumber, ‘The temporal turn in German idealism’.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 14.

⁷² Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 117 [197].

⁷³ Pippin, Robert B., ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself” (“Begierde Überhaupt”)’, in Arto Laitinen and Heikki Ikaheimo (eds), Recognition and Social Ontology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 57, 66 Google Scholar . Hegel’s Geist (reason) is more than simply the Kantian capacity for abstraction. It is our ability to make sense, of the world and of ourselves, that is steeped in experience. Pippin in ‘Reconstructivism’ calls it the faculty of ‘account-giving’. ‘A diamond net into which we bring everything to make it intelligible’ is the striking metaphor Hegel coins to capture it (quoted in Pippin, ‘Reconstructivisim’, p. 9). Reason is the object of the subsequent parts of the Phenomenology, which lie beyond my focus. My discussion centres mostly on its fourth part.

⁷⁴ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 117 [197].

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 102 [166].

⁷⁶ See Epstein, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations’.

⁷⁷ Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”’, pp. 57–8.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 59.

⁷⁹ Cited in ibid., p. 79.

⁸⁰ The French Hegelian Bernard Bourgeois, my teacher, has rendered the work of the prefix by translating Gegenstand (object) as ob-ject. See La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. Bernard Bourgois (Paris: Vrin, 2006).

⁸¹ Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”’, pp. 59–60.

⁸² Ibid., p. 60.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 64.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 64, p. 62.

⁸⁵ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 107 [174].

⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 107 [175].

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 103 [167].

⁸⁸ Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”, p. 58.

⁸⁹ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 107 [175].

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 108 [178], translation modified.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 108 [177].

⁹² Kojève, Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel.

⁹³ Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.

⁹⁴ Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

⁹⁵ Pippin, Robert B., Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

⁹⁶ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 112–13 [189].

⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 111 [187].

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Ibid., p. 113 [190].

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 103 [167].

¹⁰¹ Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”.

¹⁰² Sending, Ole Jacob, ‘Constitution, choice and change: Problems with the “logic of appropriateness” and its use in constructivist theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 8:4 (2002), pp. 443–470 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹⁰³ Elster, John, ‘The nature and scope of rational choice explanations’, in Michael Martin and Lee C. Murphy (eds), Readings in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 311 Google Scholar .

¹⁰⁴ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 8.

¹⁰⁵ See also, for example, Glynos, ‘The grip of ideology’; Glynos and Stavakakis, ‘Lacan and political subjectivity’; Arfi, ‘Fantasy in the discourse of social theory of international politics’; Epstein, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake’ and ‘Who speaks?’.

¹⁰⁶ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7.

¹⁰⁷ This script of statehood was also reproduced by the so-called Islamic state.

¹⁰⁸ Jabri, Vivienne, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (London: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹⁰⁹ Julia Gallagher, ‘Misrecognition in the making of a state: Ghana’s international relations under Kwame Nkrumah’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), this Special Issue.

¹¹⁰ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7.

¹¹¹ Lacan develops his graph of desire at various different stages of his work, but the most useful for my purposes is the one he puts forward in 1960 in ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious’, not least because it was written as a lecture addressed to an audience of philosophers well-versed in Hegel. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies also provides a good entry point into the Lacanian concept of fantasy.

¹¹² Green, Le travail du négatif.

¹¹³ Lacan, Jacques, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 240 Google Scholar .

¹¹⁴ This is why the concept of socialisation is so problematic in a Lacanian perspective; see Van Haute, Against Adaptation. For my critique in IR, see Epstein, ‘Stop telling us how to behave’.

¹¹⁵ Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, p. 240. Lacan distinguishes this repressed ‘I’ from the ‘Ego’, which contains the fundamental truth about the subject (in the form of this fantasy), from the ‘Ego’, which is the illusionary construction that served to project the unity of an actually very divided self.

¹¹⁶ Alan Sheridan, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Écrits, p. xi.

¹¹⁷ Lacan, Jacques, ‘Kant Avec Sade’, in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 765–792 Google Scholar .

¹¹⁸ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. xvi.

¹¹⁹ Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, p. 238.

¹²⁰ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. xiv.

¹²¹ Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 9.

¹²² Ibid., p. 7.

¹²³ Ibid., p. 53.

¹²⁴ For a consonant, precursory analysis of sovereignty as a generative grammar, see Wæver, Ole, ‘Identity, integration and security: Solving the sovereignty puzzle in EU studies’, Journal of International Affairs, 48:2 (1995), pp. 389–431 Google Scholar .

¹²⁵ See Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns’.

¹²⁶ For our definition of sovereign agency, see Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ibid. For the classic and highly resonant statement in deterrence theory, see Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946).

¹²⁷ This state perception is what is studied in the nuclear deterrence literature as ‘existential bias’; see Pelopidas, Benoît, ‘The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises’, European Journal of International Security, 2:2 (2017), pp. 240–262 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . My purpose here is to draw out its fantasmatic workings.

¹²⁸ Carol Cohn, in her seminal work on the discourse of defence intellectuals, has underlined the work of this masculinised desire, as well as the compensatory dynamics expressed by this discourse, notably around the metaphors of ‘male birth’. See Cohn, Carol, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12:4 (1987), pp. 687–718 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹²⁹ See Pelopidas, Benoît, ‘Nuclear weapons scholarship as a case of self-censorship in security studies’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1:4 (2016), pp. 326–336 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

¹³⁰ See Pelopidas, ‘The unbearable lightness of luck’, for the dangers of overconfidence this yields in the management of nuclear weapons.

¹³¹ The subsequent US administration’s decision to pull out from the agreement and ‘re-securitize’ the nuclear question (moving out of an energy and commercial logic and back into to a security one), is yet another attempt to deny the mutuality and cover over the constitutive dependence that the weapon lays bare. It illustrates this incremental dynamic at work in misrecognition – and the necessity to actively short-circuit it by desecuritising policies in the nuclear space. On securitisation logics, see the classic statement by Wæver, Ole, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie Libschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 41–73 Google Scholar .