Abstract

This chapter explores non-philosophy as a practice of language, by examining how linguistic enunciations are grounded differently in philosophical, scientific and aesthetic contexts, and then showing how non-philosophy performs such enunciations in a new way—suspending the philosophical presupposition that language, as logos, constitutes the Being of things, and instead enacting a nonhuman subject of speech that is indiffer-ent to ontological foundations. It takes as a key reference Laruelle’s essay ‘The Tran-scendental Computer: A Non-Philosophical Utopia’, which explores the relation of conscious thought to artificial intelligence—complicating the distinction between thought and computation, whilst also asserting that non-philosophy cannot be automated. In order to render the ideas in Laruelle’s discussion sensible, the chapter will take two instances of nonhuman linguistic creation as material: Alan Turing’s ‘abstract machine’, and Ron Athey’s performance work Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing. Both Turing and Athey offer a model for language that is grounded in its performance; however, I argue that Athey’s automatic writing machine ultimately comes closer to realising the stranger-subject of non-philosophical thinking. Thus, by reading Athey’s work alongside Laruelle, the chapter aims to explain the latter’s notions of ‘humaneity’ and the ‘performed-without-performation’, and to demonstrate how aesthetic practice can help us to underdetermine the philosophico-scientific domination of thought.