Levi Bryant

Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. He is an American philosopher known for his extensive writings on post-structural and cultural theory, including the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. His blog, "Larval Subjects," established in 2006, gained significant traction, attracting over 2 million hits by September 2011. In addition to his academic career, Bryant has also worked as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. Though not formally trained, he practices psychoanalysis in Texas, where licensure is not required. Bryant's academic journey began with an interest in philosophy during his teenage years, spurred by personal struggles. He earned his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, initially focusing on "disclosedness" before shifting his dissertation to Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which formed the basis of his first book, "Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence" (2008). He was a key figure in the object-oriented philosophy movement, coining "object-oriented ontology" in 2009 to distinguish his approach from Graham Harman's. Bryant's "onticology" challenges anthropocentrism by asserting that objects possess their own independent being, existing in both virtual and actual domains. Later, he diverged from the object-oriented ontology movement to develop a machine-oriented ontology, viewing being as composed of machines or processes. His work also includes concepts like "wilderness ontology," which expands agency beyond human exceptionalism to all entities.