[Levi Bryant] motivates a turn away from the subject of knowledge to the object of knowledge, from the epistemological to the ontological–as we should, apparently, given that the object comes first. After all, as Heidegger made ‘clear,’ “questions of knowledge are already premised on a pre-ontological comprehension of being”. Unlike Heidegger, however, who saw in this pre-ontological comprehension an interpretative basis for theorizing a collapse of subject and object (which quickly came to resemble a conceptually retooled subject), Bryant sees a call to theorize, in tentative fashion, the ‘ultimate generalities’ that objectively organize the world. Premier among these tentative ultimate generalities, he asserts, is difference. This leads Bryant to pose what he calls the ‘Ontic Principle,’ the claim “that ‘to be’ is to make or produce a difference”

¶ 4:54 PM