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Levi Bryant

Levi Bryant
Nationality American
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Speculative Realism
Main interests
Metaphysics, Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology
Notable ideas
Onticology, regime of attraction, local manifestation, virtual proper being, wilderness ontology

Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. 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.

Bryant has also 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.

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. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst.


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