Description
This paper explores whether Sylvia Wynter’s redefinition of the human offers a viable response to the question of “human nature” and the meaning of “personhood” in International Relations (IR). Rejecting essentialist conceptions inherited from Western modernity, Wynter exposes the colonial overrepresentation of “Man” as the universal human, an epistemic fiction that grounds IR’s rationalist and liberal paradigms. By contrast, she proposes a view of humanity as hybrid, biocultural, and narratively constituted: a species that lives through meaning rather than fixed essence. Read alongside Lacan, this conception gains psychoanalytic depth. For Lacan, the human subject is structured around a constitutive lack, an existential void that compels symbolic and fantasmatic constructions. “Man,” in Wynter’s sense, appears as one such fantasy: a culturally specific attempt to fill the void of being and universalise a Eurocentric ideal as human nature. Together, Wynter and Lacan reveal how states, ideologies, and institutions reproduce global orders that manage this lack through symbolic structures. Reimagining the human as a meaning-seeking, narratively grounded being destabilises IR’s naturalised assumptions of egoism and rationality, opening spaces for psychoanalytical, decolonial, and existential approaches to world politics, where the question of human nature is not answered but continually re-enacted through stories of being.
