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148 It would be difficult to think of a philosopher apparently less likely to capture the interest of Althusser than John Locke. Indeed, one might easily make the case that Locke’s philosophy in its entirety (the metaphysical and epistemological propositions expressed in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the political arguments of the Two Treatises of Government ) exemplifies that “theoretical denial of its own practice and the gigantic efforts to register this denial in coherent discourse”1 that Althusser declared dominated the history of philosophy. First, Locke’s epistemology: the under-laborer who sought to remove some of the “rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge,”2 a phrase that in certain ways might appear to anticipate certain of Althusser’s formulations concerning the activity of philosophy, cleared the way not so much forward for knowledge as backward to the absolute simplicity of a mind supposed to be “the white paper void of all characters, without any ideas,”3 the only adequate beginning for rigorous knowledge. Does not Locke posit experience (whether of external objects or of internal operations) as an origin, an absolute starting point for knowledge? Althusser regarded the concept of the origin as perhaps the most common strategy by which a philosophy could conceal from itself the historical and political realities of its own practice, taking as a starting point that it discovers what in fact is a product of its own labor (heavy with political and ideological consequences) and as such a result rather than a beginning: “The function of the concept of origin, as in original sin, is to summarize in one word what has not to be thought in order to be able to think what one wants to think.”4 Second, the relation of Locke’s political doctrines to Althusser’s Marxism would appear to be, if anything, even more antagonistic than that of his epistemology. What could be said about the philosopher who proposes not only that “government has no other end than the preservation On the Function of the Concept of Origin: Althusser’s Reading of Locke Warren Montag of property”5 but also seeks to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the “disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth” that characterized his own time rested on a foundation of right: “men have agreed” to this unequal distribution of wealth “by a tacit and voluntary consent”?6 Locke’s notion of consent (another origin) would appear to be precisely that theoretical sleight of hand which Althusser identified as the ideological interpellation of individuals as subjects: Individuals are addressed as the authors of their own servitude, which, however rigorous it may be by virtue of originating in the free will of individuals, must be regarded as legitimate and morally and legally binding. Indeed, it would be possible, from the perspective of Althusser’s philosophy, to write an entire history of liberalism through an extended mediation on the paradoxes contained in the phrase “tacit and voluntary,” not the least of which is the use of the conjunction “and” to tie tacit to voluntary consent. The phrase speaks of the fleeting and evanescent nature of consent in Locke’s world; as with Pascal’s God, we must often seek the signs of its absence; the empty spaces where it was but can be found no longer. Such difficulties clearly require the services of a philosopher; who else might explain that consent is present precisely where it appears to be absent, or rather present in its very absence in the slave who had freely engaged in war, the vagabond who chooses a life of debauchery instead of the sober virtue of wage labor, the voluntary criminal, the hostile savage who resists the Godly appropriation of wild waste? It might thus appear that the very coherence of Locke’s positions on knowledge and politics, which coincided almost totally with the dominant world-view of the ruling class in capitalist society, would deprive them of a genuinely philosophical, as opposed to historical, significance. Such was not the case, however, for Althusser. He read Locke very carefully, lectured on him with some frequency at the École Normale Supérieure, and even wrote some intriguing and dense pages on the seventeenth-century philosopher.7 While it is true that Althusser did not regard Locke as an authority and predecessor as he did Locke’s contemporary Spinoza, nor even accorded Locke the importance he did Hobbes, he nevertheless considered him a powerful thinker. For Althusser, the...

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