The physical and the automaton, introducing the radical dyad of the non-human By abandoning the principle of philosophical sufficiency in the analysis of the dialectics between thought and the real, following Laruelle and Marx, we arrive at the determination in the last instance of what philosophy calls the “human.” In its last instance, viewed beyond what philosophy postulates, the radical dyad, consisting of a signifying automaton (language) and body, we shall call the non-human resembles Haraway’s inhuman. It is a hybrid of the two categories that establishes a material continuity whereas on the transcendental level the two categories are in relation of unilaterality (or non-relation, relation that it in no sense determining). The expansion of the philosophically conceived dialectics of the two whereby the transcendental utterly subjects and supplants the real insofar as material is the metaphysical foundation for the emergence and instauration of universes of purportedly self-standing automata: subjectivity (transcending body), capitalism (transcending matter), patriarchy (transcending human animality or femaleness). These self-regulating automata purport to be self-sufficient whereas matter is of marginal philosophical relevance. Matter has economic sense by way of being invested in the creation of value. Without investment as its teleological purpose, matter is senseless. The notion of the non-human affirms the continuity between the prelingual (or the physical) and the automation of signification on the plane of the real and the material, while nonetheless relies on the postulate that the thought and the real are unilaterally positioned. The real is indifferent to thought’s making sense (of it). The dialectics of the non-human enables a different metaphysical stance that would provide the foundation for a universe after capitalism, one based on the presupposition that value, sign and abstraction are in the last instance determined by the real of human activity and materiality. The reverse logic sustains the axis of the automata of patriarchy, capitalism, and philosophy and its pretention to sufficiency accompanied by the contempt for matter as nothing more than expendable.
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