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Interstitial Life : Novelty and Double Causality in Kant , Whitehead , and Deleuze

Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze both place creativity, novelty, innovation, and the New at the center of metaphysical speculation. These concepts (or at least these words) are so familiar to us today – familiar, perhaps, to the point of nausea – that it is difficult to grasp how radical a rupture they mark in the history of Western thought. In fact, the valorization of change and novelty, which we so take for granted today, is itself a novelty of relatively recent origin. Philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is largely oriented towards anamnesis (reminiscence) and aletheia (unforgetting), towards origins and foundations, towards the past rather than the future. Whitehead breaks with this tradition, when he designates the “production of novelty” as an “ultimate notion,” or “ultimate metaphysical principle” (1929/1978, 21). This means that the New is one of those fundamental concepts that “are incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves” (1938/1968, 1). Deleuze similarly insists that the New is a value in itself: “the new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new.” There is “a difference. . . both formal and in kind” between the genuinely new, and that which is customary and established (1994, 136). Deleuze and Guattari therefore say that “the object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new” (1994, 5). Philosophical concepts are not for all time; they are not given in advance, and they “are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies.” Instead, they must always be “invented, fabricated, or rather created” afresh; “philosophers must distrust. . . those concepts they did not create themselves” (56). For both Whitehead and Deleuze, novelty is the highest criterion for thought; even truth depends upon novelty and creativity, rather than the reverse. As for creativity itself, it appears “that Whitehead actually coined the term – our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts. . .