My article “Deleuze’s concept of virtuality and critical realist ontology” has now been published by the Journal of Critical Realism. It is available for download here. This is the abstract:

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual is rooted in a tradition that
conceptualizes it in terms of potentiality rather than illusion or
falsity. His theory of the relationship between the virtual, the
actual, the real, and the possible presents similarities with
critical realism’s ontological domains of the real and the actual,
and thus offers alternative and/or additional realist ways of
thinking about those domains, especially regarding causal
powers residing in relationships rather than entities. Virtuality
applies to the empirical domain as well due to experience’s
grounding in signs, which are relational. Deleuze also employs
virtuality to formulate a concept of simulacra, which illuminates
the nature of scientific models and provides a starting point for
a critical realist approach to artworks.