ABSTRACT
Cultural creativity and especially the creativity of the artist are often related to the invention of the new. The idea of the new itself is historically relative and associated with the era of modernity. As such, the basis of the “new” has been linked to processes either of imagination or figuration—that is, to image processes created by the subject—or to the formation of metaphors in the broadest sense. In contrast to such starting points, which are mostly derived from subjective or symbolic and linguistic sources, the role and power of paradoxes in creative processes, in particular medial contradictions or “chiasms”, have been underestimated. Paradoxes in this sense are not to be seen as figures, but as a movens requiring reflection as much as it induces it. This allows us to bring together three ideas: (i) first, that the “new” or the “other” is explicable only in aporetic terms, (ii) second, that paradoxes themselves can be reconstructed as preconditions of such movements which open up creative moments, and (iii) third, as far as the concept of paradox is used, reflexivity and creativity are connected with each other in a broad and not necessarily non-logical sense that distinguishes it from “antinomy”. Hence, the creative does not concern the “wild” or irrational side of the subject or language; on the contrary, it is based in a genuine reflexive and therefore even rational capability. As such, productivity and rationality are not contradictions, but rather are interwoven, because paradoxical structures presuppose rational structures, while at the same time ruptures to these structures presuppose creativity to the same extent as they generate a creative impulse, which in turn opens up yet unknown spaces of thinking.
