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Brassier - Deleveling - Against 'Flat Ontologies' (Chapter from Under the Influence - Philosophical Festival Drift)
"Deleveling - Against 'Flat Ontologies' (Chapter from Under the Influence - Philosophical Festival Drift)" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
64 Ray Brassier Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’ Ray Brassier is associate professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut.
Definition · paragraph 6
In some flat ontologies influenced by phenomenology, such as Graham Harman’s, there is a version of phenomeno logical immanence which could be called ‘object-oriented immanence’. It retains the phenomenological primacy of in tentional interaction.
Definition · paragraph 5
This claim is not peculiar to flat ontologists; other contemporary philosophers, including Markus Gabriel and Alain Badiou, defend some version of it. According to the third thesis, there is no constituting sub jectivity: no pure Apperception, Geist, consciousness, Dasein, etc.
Definition · paragraph 11
I want to draw your attention to the way in which De Landa in corporates Deleuze’s epistemology within his ontology: this is a key move in this version of flat ontology. The philosophical task is always to identify or extract the virtual problem struc ture that conditions the structure of actuality.
Afterlife · paragraph 3
66 Thesis 4: “[F]ourth, flat ontology argues that all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects. While indeed some objects might influence the collectives to which they belong to a greater extent than others, it doesn’t follow from this that these objects are more real than others.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.