This article examines John Locke’s theory of subjectivity to challenge the recent critical tendency to associate biopolitics and empiricism. Michel Foucault, most notably among modern theorists of biopolitics, proposes that the Lockean man, or an interest-seeking animal, constitutes the paradigm of a person that remains subject to biopower. Such understanding of empiricism by biopolitical theorists is, however, reductive because Locke’s view of human subjectivity is fundamentally equivocal. As I demonstrate by analyzing his discussion of freedom, action, and desire in An (...) Essay Concerning Human Understanding and other writings, Locke admits the possibility for a human being to think and to act freely, although in the process of restricting the capacity for free action. Hence, the theorists’ simplistic view of Locke rather reflects the limits of their own conception of subjectivity, especially their behavioristic premises. As they consider a person as a mere machine of survival without agency and initiative, they preclude the possibility of overcoming biopower at the fundamental level. In demonstrating contradictions and tensions within Locke’s empiricism, this article then proposes the ways in which Locke can show a way beyond the critical impasse in political theory in elucidating the power of acting against the chain of causality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This article aims to discuss Locke’s compatibilism, that is, the lokean thesis that freedom is compatible with the natural necessity. To this end, it is analized the chapter Of The Power (XXI, book II of the An Essay concerning Human Understanding), in which Locke clarifi es the concepts of freedom and will. Although Locke, at times, involves himself with the incongruent thesis on compatibilism, he is a compatibilist. The impression that Locke would defend incompatibilists’ theories ends up being abandoned (...) when we analyze carefully his general argument about will and freedom. Locke literally defends that the volunteer does not differ from the necessary. As a compatibilist, Locke maintains that will is not free. Thus, the free man can not be the one that is free to want. A man regarded as a free agent is the one that has freedom of action, not freedom of will. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Locke is not in fact agnostic about the ultimate nature of the mind. In particular, he produces an argument, much like Jaegwon Kim's exclusion argument, to show that any materialist view that takes mental states to supervene on physical states is committed to epiphenomenalism. This result helps illuminate Locke's otherwise puzzling notion of 'superaddition.'.