On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute

Luis de Miranda

Published in The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation.

While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle.

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