What Is the Act of Creation?
The title “What Is the Act of Creation?” evokes that of a lecture given by Gilles Deleuze in Paris in March 1987. Deleuze defined the act of creation as an “act of resistance.” Resistance to death, first of all, but also resistance to the paradigm of information, through which power is exercised in what he calls “control societies,” to distinguish them from the disciplinary societies analyzed by Foucault. Each act of creation resists something—for example, Deleuze says, Bach’s music is an act of resistance against the separation of the sacred from the profane.