Life as Art
Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference
A fulfilling life is led as a collection of acts of pure creativity, at each juncture the exercise of critical freedom key to the newness and openness of the next project. Becoming is authentic engagement in pure difference. We sense this when we open up to the new, when we intuit our innate power to create.
To immerse ourselves in this way of life, we must release all traces of transcendence within us, including our need to articulate and create meaning. Meaning follows authentic acts, but cannot be grasped at. When we release from ego and de-center the psyche, we open up to infinite immanent possibility; not an abstraction, but real, both virtual and actual.
Fulfillment is realized in the pure flow of the problematic, a continuous creative realm of difference-in-itself and repetition-for-itself.
We do all of this by finding our own language that resonates, by participating in a dialogue that affirms life and imports new meaning into words and ideas that have become tired and worn out. We do this by affirming all of life on our planet, broadly defined, organic and inorganic, the virtual and the actual, which is one and the same with all of creativity.
We empty ourselves of all transcendence and enter the being of the sensible, which is both the nothing and the everything of all that is: the non-duality or oneness of reality and the plurality of reality.
We live life as art by letting go: letting go into becoming, and releasing our grasp on transcendence. Transcendent truth is a fiction. But the truth that lies beyond words, where words turn back, the truth of pure creativity, pure difference, is real. It is problematic truth, a constructed truth that inspires and activates life affirming forces.
This is perhaps the secret, to make something exist, and not to judge. If it is so distasteful to judge, this is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary, because everything that is of value can only create and distinguish itself by defying judgement. — Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
This publication is dedicated to exploring ways in which we can practically live a life of becoming, a life of pure difference, and in doing so, access radical freedom in our daily lives to evolve continuously.
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
