What is the "New"?

What is the new? Deleuze frequently said that the question of the conditions for the production of the new – or novelty (Whitehead) or creativity (Bergson) – was one of the fundamental questions of contemporary thought. In this article, we distinguish the problem of new from a number of related but distinct problems, such as questions of transformation and change, causality, and emergence. Deleuze’s claim is that novelty (difference) must become a fundamental concept at the most basic ontological level (Being = the new = difference). We ask what the conditions for the production of the new might be, and argue that such conditions must be differential through and through, where difference is related to difference through difference itself.