Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.
Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. His blog, Larval Subjects, was founded in 2006 and had over 2 million hits as of September 2011.
In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. While not formally trained as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Bryant practices psychoanalysis in the state of Texas, which does not require licensure for practicing psychoanalysis.
Life
Bryant became interested in philosophy as a teenager, after struggling through personal turmoil. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally intended to study 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, with his analysis becoming the basis of his first book, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, published in 2008.
Philosophical work
He was a member of the object-oriented philosophy movement and coined the term object-oriented ontology in 2009 to distinguish positions that are committed to the thesis that beings are composed of things from Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy. His own version of object-oriented thought, called 'onticology', disprivileges human experience from a central position in metaphysical inquiry, while holding that objects are always split between two domains, virtuality and actuality. For Bryant, virtuality refers to the powers and potential of any given object, whereas actuality designates the qualities manifested by the actualization of an object's potential at any given point in time. Later Bryant, concerned with the doctrine of withdrawal and the non-relationism of object-oriented philosophy, departed from the object-oriented ontology movement and developed a machine-oriented ontology that argues being is composed entirely of machines or processes.
Onticology
Like other object-oriented ontologists, Bryant opposes the anthropocentrism of the Copernican Revolution proposed by Immanuel Kant, wherein objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. From Bryant's perspective, the Kantian contention that reality is inaccessible to human knowledge because it is structured by human cognition limits philosophy to a self-reflexive analysis of the mechanisms and institutions through which cognition structures reality. He states:
To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented philosophy called 'onticology', grounded in three principles. First, the Ontic Principle states that "there is no difference that does not make a difference." Following from the premises that questions of difference precede epistemological interrogation and that to be is to produce differences, this principle posits that knowledge cannot be fixed prior to engagement with difference. Consequently, for Bryant, the thesis that things-in-themselves exist outside the boundaries of knowledge is untenable because it presupposes forms of being that make no differences. Similarly, concepts of difference predicated upon negation—that which objects are not or lack when placed in comparison with one another—are dismissed as arising only from the perspective of consciousness, rather than an ontological difference that affirms independent being. Second, the Principle of the Inhuman asserts that the concept of difference producing difference is not restricted to human, sociocultural, or epistemological domains, thereby marking the being of difference as independent of knowledge and consciousness. Humans exist as difference-making beings among other difference-making beings, therefore, without holding any special position with respect to other differences. Third, the Ontological Principle maintains that if there is no difference that does not also make a difference, then the making of difference is the minimal condition for the existence of being. In Bryant's words, "if a difference is made, then the being is." Bryant further contends that differences produced by an object can be inter-ontic (made with respect to another object) or intra-ontic (pertaining the internal constitution of the object).