Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion

The Bricolage of Images: Constructing the Cartographies of the Unconscious

Inna Semetsky

Deleuze considered ‘an unconscious of thought [to be] just as profound as the unknown of the body’ (Deleuze 1988b: 19, Deleuze’s italics). The quality of profundity is significant and relates schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) as a transgressive mode of production of human subjectivity that includes the realm of the unconscious and unthought, to Jung’s depth psychology. Deleuze’s conception of the unconscious is closer to Jung’s, rather than Freud’s, theoretical base (Kerslake 2007). Jung’s notion of individuation is akin to Deleuze’s concept of becoming-other (Semetsky 2011) as the affective process of encounters with the unconscious. A schizoanalytic practice is related to bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) defined as a spontaneous human action grounded in the characteristic patterns of mythological, savage, thinking – or rather, non-thinking.

For Deleuze, rational Cogito as the sole constituent of thought is insufficient because what is yet non-thought is equally capable of producing multiple effects. The dimension of the ‘unthought [is] not external to thought’ (Deleuze 1988a: 97) but is being enfolded into ‘its very heart’ (Deleuze 1988a: 97).

The method of critical thinking is inadequate to reach to the very heart, to the very depth of the unconscious. Deleuze’s approach is both critical and clinical (Deleuze 1997). Kerslake (2007: 4) suggests that we suspend the clinical dimension but contends that it is not always possible to separate it from the critical. It should not be, indeed. Deleuze considered philosophers, artists, and writers to be first and foremost semioticians and symptomatologists who can read extralinguistic signs and symbols as symptoms of life, therefore literally putting into practice the clinical, non-philosophical (if philosophy is understood reductively as a strictly analytic reason) aspect and therefore capable of potentially healing and transforming this very life. As an example of schizoanalytic, clinical practice, this chapter introduces the bricolage of Tarot images, which speak in the silent discourse (Semetsky 2010) of the esoteric, non-verbal, language that nonetheless can be read and interpreted.

While linguistic propositions are the prerogative of the conscious mind, the language of the unconscious expresses itself in legible images (Semetsky 2011, 2013). The unconscious ideas need a means of expression other than a plainly discursive reason; still we can read and interpret such a language as a system of signs. By becoming conscious of the unconscious we articulate as yet silent images as the schizoanalytic ‘assemblages of enunciation’ (Guattari 1995: 59) and translate them into spoken words. The notion of language per se is re-conceptualized. Rather than being reduced to propositional thought and verbal language, it becomes ‘the marriage of language and the unconscious’ (Deleuze 1990b: xiii). Referring to esoteric languages, Deleuze mentions the ‘grand literal, syllabic, and phonetic synthesis of Court de Gébelin’ (Deleuze 1990b: 140). It was in 1781 when the French pastor and author Antoine Court de Gébelin introduced his ideas of the Egyptian origins of Tarot as related to the Hermetic philosophy taught by the sage Hermes Trismegistus. De Gébelin’s nine-volume encyclopaedia was called Primitive World (Le Monde Primitif) and devoted to the Golden Age of ancient civilization when people were united by one language and one religion. Indeed, as the Biblical account of Genesis (11:1) tells us, once upon a time the whole earth was of one language and of one speech, united by the same understanding of the nature of the universe.

The unconscious that ‘speaks’ in esoteric language exceeds the narrow boundaries of the Freudian personal repressed: ‘the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 283), to the world of nature. Jungian unconscious is collective: it is the objective psyche containing skeletal patterns of typical experiences concealed in humankind’s collective memory permeated by archetypes, which ‘are not just “in the mind”: they are in nature’ (Laszlo 1995: 135). They subsist in the virtual field of becoming posited by Deleuze to be as real as the actual plane of manifested phenomena, and an object of experience is considered to be given only in its tendency to exist, that is, in the virtual, potential form. The realm of the virtual is reminiscent of, but not limited to, the Jungian archetype of the Shadow (Semetsky 2013) that hides in the collective unconscious or, on the plane of expression, for Deleuze, in the shadow around the words. The encounter with the shadowy structures hiding in the unconscious leads to making sense of, and creating meaning for, our experiences. For Deleuze, ‘Sense is essentially produced’ (Deleuze 1990b: 95).

Contrary to reductive empiricism positing an individual as born in the state of blank slate, Deleuze claims that ‘one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle’ (Deleuze 1988b: 123) amidst the archetypal images comprising the field of the collective unconscious. The unconscious, which is over and above its personal dimension, is conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari as anti-Oedipal, irreducible to Freud’s master-signified. Similar to Jung’s collective unconscious, it always deals with social and natural frame and is a virtual ‘productive machine … at once social and desiring’ (Deleuze 1995: 144). Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual posits the world as consisting not of substantial things but of relational entities or multiplicities, and the production of subjectivity is necessarily embedded amidst the relational, experimental, and experiential dynamics. The dynamics of becoming, when any given multiplicity ‘changes in nature as it expands its connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8), is a distinctive feature of Deleuzian philosophy. The constant becoming-other constitutes the process of ‘individuation [that] precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual’ (Deleuze 1994: 38). The process of becoming is grounded in the intensive capacity ‘to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvi) as part and parcel of the schizoanalytic production of subjectivity. Archetypes as virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming actual through the process of multiple different/ciations of the transcendental and ‘initially undifferentiated field’ (Deleuze 1993: 10) not unlike Jung’s field of the collective unconscious.

The virtual and the actual are mutually enfolded, and ‘we go from fold to fold’ (Deleuze 1993: 17) within the unfolding experience. Says Deleuze, ‘I undo the folds … that pass through every one of my thresholds … “the twenty-two folds” that surround me and separate me from the deep’ (1993: 93). Citing Henri Michaux, he says that children are born with the twenty-two folds which are to be unfolded. Only then can human life become complete, fulfilled, individuated. These twenty-two folds, implicated in subjectivity, correspond to the number of images in the Major Arcana of a typical Tarot deck and which symbolically represent what Deleuze called the world of problems embodied in the archetypal journey from the Fool to the World (Figure 6.1).

Each image is a sign that portends and points to something beyond itself, to the whole gamut of archetypal motifs. A semiotic engagement with experiential milieus enables us ‘to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight’ (Deleuze 1995: 141). The very first Arcanum called the Fool portrays a figure at the edge of abyss just about to make a step – to trace a line of flight – without which it would have forever remained a literal Fool without the possibility of ever reaching the final Arcanum, the World, also called the Universe in some decks. It is the lines of flight or becoming that lead us into the universe of possibilities: ‘Each one of us has his own line of the universe to discover, but is only discovered through tracing it’ (Deleuze 1986: 195) – through becoming conscious of the unconscious. The unconscious is embedded in the virtual space of the Deleuzian ‘outside’ as an unorthodox memory ‘animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside but precisely the inside of the outside … . The inside is an operation of the outside:… an inside … is … the fold of the outside’ (Deleuze 1988a: 96–97).

Like Jung’s objective psyche, the virtual space of the outside ‘possesses a full reality by itself … it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced’ (Deleuze 1994: 211). Jung commented that Freud ‘was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of the unconscious has … an inside and an outside’ (Jung 1963: 153) – analogous to Deleuze’s semiotics grounded in the folded, a-signifying, relations between the inside and the outside. It is the transversal connection created by the bricolage of laid-down images that functions as Jung’s transcendent function: traversing the fold prevents the two realms of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ from remaining forever separated by the supposedly unbridgeable, indeed schizophrenic, gap of Cartesian dualism. The prefix ‘trans’ is significant: the unconscious dimension is transcended by means of an indirect, transversal, link of a symbolic mediation via the archetypal images, thus establishing ‘the bond of a profound complicity between [unconscious] nature and [conscious] mind’ (Deleuze 1994: 165) leading to the conjunction and unification of opposites, the mystical coincidentia oppositorum, which determines the very threshold of consciousness. Deleuze and Guattari relate mystical participation in the reality of what is produced to the figure of the schizophrenic who, because of his intense connection to the unconscious, lives within the very interface with nature, without, however, being capable of becoming conscious of this very predicament. It is schizoanalysis, such as the bricolage of Tarot, that would have enabled him to integrate the unconscious into consciousness, to become-other rather than being overwhelmed by the ‘fractured I of a dissolved Cogito’ (Deleuze 1994: 194) forming what Jung called complexes.

Derived from the common archetypal core as well as actual experiences, complexes act similarly to Deleuze’s pure affects: they are autonomous and ‘behave like independent beings’ (Jung CW8, 253) over and above conscious intentionality of the Cartesian subject. Jung argued that ‘there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life … there is something in me that can say things that I do not know and do not intend’ (1963: 183) because these ‘things’ act at the unconscious level as signs beyond one’s conscious will or voluntary control. Deleuze would have agreed; he says that the ‘intentionality of being is surpassed by the fold of Being, Being as fold’ (Deleuze 1988a: 110). It is multiple signs comprising the objective psyche that continuously create novel relations in our real experience because as dynamic, archetypal forces, they are capable of affecting and effecting changes, thus deterritorrializing and reterritorializing subjectivities in accord with the unfolding dynamics of the Fool’s individuation. The unconscious perceptions are implicated as subliminal, or micro-, perceptions (Deleuze 1993); as such, they become part of the cartographic microanalysis – schizoanalysis – of establishing ‘an unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness’ (Deleuze 1993: 95).

Cartography, by definition, is a mode of graphic communication capable of transmitting visual messages such as those encoded in the hieroglyphic imagery of Tarots. The graphic information may be expressed in the form of a diagram, network, or map, or in the mixed format of a cartogram, that is, a diagram superimposed on a map. Sure enough, because the production of subjectivity includes the realm of the unconscious, ‘the cartographies of the unconscious would have to become indispensable complements to the current systems of rationality of … all … regions of knowledge and human activity’ (Guattari, original French, in Bosteels 1998: 155). The cartography of the unconscious is represented by the layout of Tarot signs, symbols, and images; and what I earlier called the Tarot hermeneutic (Semetsky 2011, 2013) is exemplary of Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental empiricism. Deleuze’s method is empirical as embedded in the multiple contexts, situations, and events of human experiences; yet it is radically transcendental because the very foundations for the empirical principles are left outside our common faculties of perception so that we have to transcend them in practice, hence ourselves becoming capable of perceiving the seemingly imperceptible.

Transcendental empiricism affirms ‘the double in the doubling process’ (Deleuze 1988a: 98). ‘Doubling’ is taken in the sense of unfolding that presupposes a necessary existence of the extra, ‘outside’, dimension, without which the concept of fold is meaningless. This outside dimension becomes internalized, enfolded; hence ‘doubling as the interiorization of the outside [becomes] redoubling of the Other [and] it is a self that lives in me as the double of the other: I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me’ (Deleuze 1988a: 98). The other in me is thus always implicit in the unconscious, the esoteric language of which is to be translated into verbal expressions and made explicit so as to indeed effectuate the process of becoming-other. Expanding on Deleuzian conceptualizations, we can actually see the internalization of the outside, which came about by redoubling, not in consciousness as an abstract concept, but with our very eyes as a concrete picture. Just so as to become able to be seen, it would have been re-redoubled; in a way, transcended, albeit in the seemingly primitive, savage, mode of spreading the Tarot pictures. Deleuze wants to achieve the means so as to literally ‘show the imperceptible’ (Deleuze 1995: 45), that is, become capable of bridging the gap between the sensible and the intelligible, matter and mind. The imperceptible affects can be shown – made visible, perceptible, sensible – rather than simply thought at the level of rational mind. Perceiving something essentially imperceptible – or making the invisible visible as the major postulate of the Hermetic philosophy – is made possible by means of laying down the plane of immanence. That’s how Deleuze and Guattari defined the plane of immanence which is not in any way to be reduced to reason alone:

Precisely because the plane of immanence … does not immediately take effects with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41)

The construction of the plane of ‘immanence [which] is the unconscious itself’ (Deleuze 1988b: 29) implies the affective and erotic awakening of the eye of the mind – the nous – as opposed to the gaze of the Cogito dispassionately observing a distant world of objects. This awakening is a prerogative of ‘the genesis of intuition in intelligence’ (Deleuze 1991: 111) due to which we can perceive the imperceptible and become conscious of the unconscious. Everything has ‘its cartography, its diagram … What we call a “map”, or sometimes a “diagram” is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map)’ (Deleuze 1995: 33). If the lines in a hand form a map, so do Tarot cartograms when spread in the rhizomatic network forming a specific layout (Figure 6.2) that reflects a semiotic, extralinguistic structure of the yet unthought:

Figure 6.2 The cartograms of Tarot.

Constructing the Tarot map demands ‘the laying out of a plane’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 36). The layout forms a multiplicity and displays a specific logic. Deleuze’s radical empiricism is ‘fundamentally linked to a logic – a logic of multiplicities’ functioning in accord with ‘a theory and practice of relations, of the and’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: viii, 15). Multiplicities always have a middle element, the included ‘third which … disturbs the binarity of the two’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 131) that are usually presented as opposites in the framework of Cartesian dualism with its separate substances of res cogitans and res extensa. And as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pointed out, the ‘only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 276). A layout of picture is sure in-between: between self and other, consciousness and the unconscious. The logic of the included third, the infamous tertium of antiquity, makes the otherwise binary opposites to complement each other, to form a relation as genuine signs are supposed to do. Such triadic, a-signifying semiotics represents a major Peircean inflection in Deleuze’s corpus (Semetsky 2006). As ‘a being-multiple’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: viii) multiplicity is a relational and not substantial entity, a genuine sign that defies direct representation but, indirectly and enigmatically, like a hieroglyph to be deciphered, portends and indicates something other than itself. Such are Tarot signs whose implicit meanings are to be deciphered, explicated.

A Tarot ‘map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12). The exact reproduction would mean a reduction to the excluded middle, to the analytic philosophy of language based on the logical copula ‘is’, the ideology of direct representation. But the logic of the included middle, of the conjunction ‘and’, is anti-representational, indirect but mediated as forming extralinguistic, semiotic structures. The ‘and’ is not a numerical addition but a process of summation that, while suggesting a simple adding of empirical facts, in fact intensifies experience (the multiplicity is intensive!) by means of forming a logical product akin to multiplication, to forming power series. Deleuze is adamant that ‘there is not a simple addition, but a constitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313). The addition will have indicated the linearity of the process. But the logic of signs is nonlinear, triadic, interrupted now and then by ‘a new threshold, a new direction of the zigzagging line, a new course for the border’ (Deleuze 1995: 45) not unlike the movement from one state of human condition to another symbolically represented by the twenty-two paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Analogously, the twenty-two images of Major Arcana represent an evolutionary dynamics of ‘topological and specifically cartographic’ (Bosteels 1998: 146) being-as-becoming. The structure of the symbolic Tree of Life, as well the rhizomatic structure of a typical Tarot layout, is ‘more like grass than a tree’ (Deleuze 1995: 149), and the rhizome’s growth – contrary to the growth of a tree – does not proceed from the root up, but is distributed among the multiple, and hidden underground, paths that trace the lines of becoming. Thinking is ‘not just a theoretical matter. It [is] to do with vital problems. To do with life itself’ (Deleuze 1995: 105).

This true, vitalistic, and enduring, even if invisible and virtual, life is a life as pure immanence (Deleuze 2001) concealed in the transcendental field of the collective unconscious. It thus needs to be unfolded, or revealed from its concealment, like the scroll in the image of the High Priestess (Figure 6.1) that hides in its folds the symbols of secret and esoteric, Gnostic, knowledge. Coincidentally, Jung used the same metaphor of the rhizome as Deleuze:

The life of a man is a dubious experiment … . Individually, it is so fleeting … Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition … . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (Jung 1963: 4)

The integration of the unconscious into consciousness leads to the ‘intensification of life’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 74). By means of interpreting Tarot images, we immerse into an affective ‘experimentation on ourselves [that] is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 11); these multiple potential combinations expressed by the images of the Major and Minor Arcana combined in a layout.

One is not consciously passing through the line of flight: Deleuze insists that ‘something [is] passing through you’ (Deleuze 1995: 141) at the yet unconscious, subtle level and materializing in the constellation of images occupying this or that position in the layout (Semetsky 2011). It is via laying out the plane of immanence formed on the material plane by Tarot images that we can become aware of the unconscious and, like the Hermetic Magi, participate in making the invisible visible. The mode of transversal communication created by Tarot hermeneutic provides an epistemic access to the invisible virtual field representing as such ‘a plane of transcendence, a kind of design, in the mind of man or in the mind of a god, even when it is accorded a maximum of immanence by plunging it into the depth of Nature, or of the Unconscious’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 91).

The experimentation comprising the process of individuation can reach to the limit-experience exemplified in the Arcanum Death (Figure 6.1) representing ‘the harshest exercise in depersonalization’ (Deleuze 1995: 6). A symbolic death is a painful, fearful, and lengthy event; time may appear to stand still (Temperance) especially if we remain unconscious of staying in the grip of our old habits (the Devil). So sometimes we have to be hit by symbolic lightning to break the ivory tower of the old outlived values we have imprisoned ourselves in (the Tower). Only then our symbolic rebirth (the Sun) and resurrection (Judgement) become possible so that we can become what in fact we were meant to be all along – even if initially only in the mind of a god (as Deleuze says), inexpressible in propositional thought and verbal language. The explication of the meanings implicit in the rhizomatic network comprising Tarot layout enables one to make sense out of the disparate bits and pieces of confusing issues that are symbolically represented in images, to become conscious of the unconscious ideas, to transform and re-create oneself via ‘an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning’ (Deleuze 1994: 154). Our ideas are often so enveloped or enfolded ‘in the soul that we can’t always unfold or develop them’ (Deleuze 1993: 49) by means of our cognitive tools alone, unless experience itself becomes saturated with affective, almost numinous, conditions for their unfolding, because this deep inner ‘knowledge is known only where it is folded’ (Deleuze 1993: 49).

The symbolism of the High Priestess with the scroll of folded knowledge on her lap affirms itself again and again! Such a limit-experience in real life appears to be achieved only by mystics, shamans, magicians or sorcerers (Semetsky 2009; Delpech-Ramey 2010; Semetsky and Delpech-Ramey 2011) who are capable of unfolding her scroll. The experiential world itself is folded – it is, as Charles S. Peirce was saying – perfused with signs! Only as such we are able to

endure it, so that everything doesn’t confront us at once … There’s no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject. The time comes once we’ve worked through knowledge and power; it’s that work that forces us to frame a new question, it couldn’t have been framed before … Subjectification is an artistic activity. (Deleuze 1995: 112–114)

Such creative, schizoanalytic production is a function of time; it is not intentional or volitional but depends on our learning from unfolding experiences so that we can ‘frame a new question’ precisely because of the evolution of consciousness that brings to our awareness this or that problem, which ‘couldn’t have been framed before’. The archetypal patterns embodied in Tarot imagery, while making us act unconsciously, lead to learning because their ‘structure is part of objects themselves [hence] allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning’ (Deleuze 1994: 64; italics Deleuze’s). Such semiotic learning takes us to future territories which are created from the virtual out of which we live. The actualization of virtual potentialities is ‘always a genuine creation’ (Deleuze 1994: 212). The Fool’s creative becomings exemplified in other Major Arcana accord with ‘a theory and practice of relations, of the AND’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 15) as the prerogative of the logic of multiplicities – the logic of signs which are a priori a-signifying and in a need of the included middle, the conjunction ‘and’ created by the transversal communication. Semiotics is irreducible to ‘the logic of a language. It is a description of the structures that appear when being is understood as the encounter of events and series’ (Williams 2008: 23). The logic of verbal language is grounded in identity, but the logic of signs and images is grounded in the ‘destruction of identity’ (Deleuze 1995: 44). Even as Tarot schizoanalysis ‘upsets being’ (Deleuze 1995: 44) because of the multiple lines of flight taken by the symbolic Fool, it is along those very lines that ‘things come to pass and becomings evolve’ (1995: 45).

When mapped onto a pictorial spread, the virtual reality of signs undergoes transformations that ‘convey the projection, on external space, of internal spaces defined by “hidden parameters” and variables or singularities of potential’ (Deleuze 1993: 16) in our actual experience. Hidden variables become exposed in our very practice: what was buried in the depth of the psyche – hiding, symbolically, in the form of enfolded ‘ambiguous signs’ (Deleuze 1993: 15) is literally brought to the surface and made available to consciousness. The very depth of the psyche is capable of making sense so that we can discover the deep meanings of our experiences only when it, ‘having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width’ (Deleuze 1990: 9) on the flat surface or plane as a cartographic map that creates ‘harmony and interference’ (Williams 2008: 163) between matter and mind and reflects on the confluence between Deleuze’s thought and the principles of Hermetic philosophy (Ramey 2012) as representative of the ‘minor’ tradition in philosophy, namely Western esotericism. The priority of signs and relations prevalent in the Hermetic worldview is equally important for Deleuze: ‘A and B. The AND is … the path of all relations’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 57). It is the conjunction ‘and’ that connects the opposites, thus suspending the whole dualistic split between the sensible and the intelligible, between rational thought and lived experience, between cognition and sensation, between material and spiritual, between the human and the divine.

A transversal link established by Tarot crosses over the a-signifying gap and connects the dual opposites in one common assemblage. The mode of transversal communication is indirect, mediated by archetypal images, and operates in order ‘to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 84) as the individuated subjectivity. The process of creating identity anew is a semiotic process of sense-making, and the unconscious is the necessary – and quite often, as Deleuze would say, dark, especially when appearing in the image of the Devil, or the Moon, or the Tower (Figure 6.1) – precursor for individuation, for becoming-other when encountering experiential problems. The embodiment of ideas is a must. We learn when we become aware of the unconscious ideas symbolically presented in the materiality of Tarot because to learn means

to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem. Moreover, problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal objects of little perceptions. As a result, ‘learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind. (Deleuze 1994: 165)

Signs demand ‘the corresponding apprenticeship’ (Deleuze 2000: 92) in the form of Tarot hermeneutic that ultimately elicits the transformational pragmatics of experience originating ‘among a broken chain of affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9). Affects are ‘becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else)’ (Deleuze 1995: 127) within the ‘initiatory ordeal’ (Ramey 2012: 3) when matter and psyche as two sides of the always already Janus-faced signs fold back on themselves during a self-reflective, critical, and clinical schizoanalytic practice of Tarot readings at the limit of ordinary cognitive capacities of the mind. Becoming-other is described as ‘an extreme contiguity within coupling of two sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection … . It is a zone … of indiscernibility … This is what is called an affect’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173). Deleuze purports to show the as-yet-imperceptible by laying down a visible ‘map’ of the invisible ‘territory’ via creating the conjunction ‘and’ between what are customarily considered the dualistic opposites (‘without resemblance’) of mind and body, psyche and physis. It is the relational dynamics constituting the logic of the included middle that forms the triad of affects, percepts, and concepts. It is the presence of affect or desire that connects the levels of reality by crossing over, or traversing, the difference between the virtual and the actual and exceeding purely analytic thinking.

Deleuze uses the term ‘parallelism’ with regard to the mind–body problem and asserts that there must be a threshold that brings thought to the body. One has to ‘pursue the different series, to travel along the different levels, and cross all thresholds; instead of simply displaying phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must form a transversal or mobile diagonal line’ (Deleuze 1988a: 22), a line of flight or becoming exemplified in Tarot practice. An authentic Tarot reader indeed travels along different levels and crosses the thresholds of the barely liminal, hence bringing to awareness the unthought, unconscious, dimension via the auto-referential relation represented by ‘a power to affect itself, an affect of self on self’ (Deleuze 1988a: 101). A Tarot reader is a bricoleur who makes a creative, partaking of demiurgical, synthesis of the material-at-hand. The Tarot signs embody ‘levels of sensation … like arrests or snapshots of motion, which would recompose the movement synthetically in all its continuity’ (Deleuze 2003: 35). As Deleuze says,

A flat image or, conversely, the depth of field, always has to be created and re-created – signs … always imply a signature … . All images combine the same … signs, differently. But not any combination’s possible at just any moment: a particular element can only be developed given certain conditions … . So there are different levels of development, each of them perfectly coherent. (Deleuze 1995: 49)

The different levels of development showcase themselves in the various constellations of Tarot images. The identity is perpetually contested and re-created in the guise of different Arcana. The unfolding of the unconscious brings forth an element of creativity and presents ‘life as a work of art’ (Deleuze 1995: 94). Such life, created as an experiment grounded in schizoanalysis, is neutral (Deleuze 2001) – that is, beyond good and evil or any other binary opposites of modern discourse. Coincidentally, Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist and Nobel laureate who was Jung’s collaborator on the concept of synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence between psyche and physis, envisaged the gradual discovery of a neutral language (Meier 2001) that functions symbolically to describe an invisible, potential reality, which is inferable indirectly through its visible effects. Responding to Pauli, Jung pointed out the ‘materialization of a potentially available reality, an actualization of the mundus potentialis’ (Meier 2001: 83) – the archetypal, intermediary, world as mecocosm posited by Henry Corbin – that thus becomes a matter of empirical fact and that we indeed encounter in the material form of Tarot images. Tarot symbolism, in its mediating function, crosses over the psychophysical dualism. Tarot brings forth the neutral, immanent, life expressed in the esoteric language of images. This is ‘an impersonal and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens’ (Deleuze 1997: xiv). A transversal connection enables us to participate in this singular life by bridging together subjectivity and objectivity, immanence and transcendence so that ‘the individual [becomes] able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world’ (Deleuze 1994: 178).

The syntactical link produced by verbal language grounded in the logic of identity does not include Sens as meaning and direction, or the course of practical action. This impoverished syntactic link is transformed into meaningful semiotic connection enabled not by verbal propositions of the conscious mind alone but by the pictorial language of Tarot images and symbols that express the depth of the unconscious. The synthetic method reflects the future-oriented productivity of affect or desire capable of transcending ‘spatial locations and temporal successions’ (Deleuze 1994: 83). Deleuze refers to the ‘levels of profundity’ (Deleuze 1991: 59) in the past. The synthetic, and not solely analytic, quality embedded in depth psychology and schizoanalysis alike is oriented to the creative emergence of new meanings, hence bringing in the paradoxical dimension of future anterior. Jung emphasized the prospective function of the unconscious or what Deleuze, following Bergson, called the memory of the future that, together with all of the past, is enfolded in the cosmic ‘gigantic memory’ (Deleuze 2001: 212). These three dimensions of time – past, present, and the potential coming-into-being future – coexist in one and the same Tarot spread (Figure 6.2) with each position denoting a time-element so that, paradoxically, ‘everything culminates in a “has been” ’ (Deleuze 1990b: 159). Deleuze and Guattari say that becoming is an antimemory (1987: 294). Is an antimemory a memory of the future? The enigmatic notion of an antimemory relates to the specific synthesis of time as the future anterior which is always already projected in the Tarot layout. We head for the future along the line of becoming that, like the witch’s flight, escapes the old frame of reference by vanishing through an event horizon, yet appearing anew as if ‘willed’ by the magic wand in the Magician Arcanum (Figure 6.1) as the very symbol of the transversal link. We thus achieve an expanded perception of time and space, which become ‘released from their human coordinates’ (Deleuze 1986: 122) that capture space merely in its three dimensions and time as chronological and linear. Our habitual ‘space-time ceases to be a pure given in order to become … the nexus of differential relations in the subject, and the object itself ceases to be an empirical given in order to become the product of these relations’ (Deleuze 1993: 89) as a newly created concept.

A virtual event, for Deleuze, is always ‘already past and yet in the future, always the day before and the day after’ (1990: 77), coexisting on the plane of immanence. In Pauli’s 1948 essay called Modern Examples of Background Physics (Meier 2001: 179–196), he commented on the doubling of the psyche (not unlike Deleuze’s and Foucault’s conceptualizations) akin to human birth as a division of the initial unity. Time-wise, the doubling of the time-series is represented by Aion and Chronos with the instance of Kairos in-between. Such moment of Kairos becomes seized under the affective conditions constituting an event of Tarot reading that partakes of mystical experience. Deleuze (1989) equated mystical experience with an event of a sudden actualization of potentialities, that is, awakening of perceptions such as seeing and hearing by raising them to a new power of enhanced perception; a becoming-percept which is future oriented towards a virtual (as yet imperceptible) object. Such ‘a vision and a voice … would have remained virtual’ (Goddard 2001: 54) unless some specific experiential conditions necessary for the actualization of the virtual would have been established. It is the desiring-production that enables us to apprehend the deepest symbolic meanings constituting ‘the fragments of ideal future [and] past events, which [would] render the problem solvable’ (Deleuze 1994: 190; also Kerslake 2007: 109). Such is the apprenticeship in signs (Bogue and Semetsky 2010) that provides us not only with a symbolic diagnosis – that is, reading the signs as the indices of the present – but prognosis as well in terms of evaluating and outlining the rhizomatic structure created by images comprising a particular layout. It is during esoteric experiences such as dreams, déjà-vu, involuntary memories, or Tarot readings that we are able to perceive the level of the virtual enfolded in the grandiose time of coexistence capable of unfolding, or disclosing, it.

The Tarot hermeneutic sure enough brings forth the clinical element in Deleuze’s philosophy: ‘which of [the rhizomatic lines] are dead-ended or blocked, which cross voids … and most importantly the line of steepest gradient, how it draws in the rest, towards what destination … [T]his line has always been there, although it is the opposite of a destiny’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 125). It is the opposite of destiny not because fate as such does not exist, but because we can liberate ourselves from its firm grip and become free to choose the line of flight in our experiential journey, thereby potentially changing our very destiny! As Deleuze pointed out, what is called destiny

never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations … . Consider what we call repetition within a life – more precisely, within a spiritual life. Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another … [and] each of them plays out ‘the same life’ at a different levels. That is what we call destiny . … That is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels. (Deleuze 1994: 83)

Tarot gives us freedom to choose different levels by exploring various options concerning alternative courses of action akin to human liberation from fate via theosis or theandry, that is, an identification of the soul with the divine in our embodied practice, hence naturalizing mysticism.

Deleuze presents us with reversed Platonism: Plato discovered philosophy as spiritual ordeal (cf. Ramey 2012), an examined life; yet he simultaneously restricted its nature that later led to the dogmatic image of thought uncontaminated by paradox or tertium quid. But the new image of thought defies dualism because a sign is never ‘one [or] two … it is the in-between’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293) in accord with the included middle of the immanent-transcendent ‘quality of conjoined opposites’ (Jung CW8: 189). The dynamics of signs proceeds in a double movement of different/ciation. An expanded reality of conjoined levels presents the actual and the virtual as a semiotic relation grounded in difference defined as ‘the noumenon closest to phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1994: 222). The virtual is posited just as a tendency, therefore no-thing. Significantly, the numeral corresponding to the very first Arcanum in the deck, the Fool, is Zero or nothing. Virtual tendencies as potentialities or no-things become actualized, as though created ex nihilo and embodied in the actual things partaking of new objects of knowledge as created concepts. The nuance is significant: ‘from virtuals we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160). The Fool-Zero exemplifies the body without organs as symbolic of unlimited freedom of perception and action unrestricted by the limitations of physical organs. Yet, it is a desire for gnosis that propels the as yet disembodied Fool to jump into the abyss so as to connect with the physical world, this world. It is such desire ‘immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 89) that creates or lays down the plane of immanent consistency in the form of the layout of images.

The topology of Tarot is a precondition for sense-making. For Deleuze, ‘typology begins with topology . … We have the truths that we deserve depending on the place we are carrying our existence to, the hour we watch over and the element that we frequent’ (Deleuze 1983: 110), that is, a specific context as a singularity of event. What is traditionally called the mystery of coincidentia oppositorum is grounded in Deleuze’s realist ontology that understands cosmos in terms of virtual reality comprising multiple levels of existence. It is ‘the difference between the virtual and the actual [which] requires that the process of actualisation be a creation’ (Hardt 1993: 18) – such as the creation of novel concepts and meanings that were imperceptible and unknown prior to being explicated in Tarot images via constructing the plane of immanent consistency. The plane of immanence is enfolded analogous to the Baroque art that expresses the harmonious multiplicity of folds (Deleuze 1993), of ambiguous signs. The function of affect or desire may appear analogous to what Nietzsche called the will to power; according to Deleuze, however, ‘there are other names for it. For example, “grace” ’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 91). Desire, Affect, Eros! Whatever its name, this is what accomplishes the Neoplatonic double movement of ascending and descending, of folding and unfolding. Eros, the mystical son of Poros and Penia, was conceived in an act that has occurred in the middle and muddle of ‘groping experimentation … that … belong[s] to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41). As a culmination of desire sparked between the two deities, Eros unites the two. The erotic desire deconstructs the Neoplatonic Oneness by means of bringing it (One) down to earth into the multiplicity and diversity of real, flesh-and-blood, human experiences. Hence follows what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) present as a magical formula expressed as ‘One = Many’ as unity in multiplicity. The symbolic Eros ‘does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings which it traverses’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 292) thus establishing transversal communication as a necessary condition for ‘the famous mystical principle of coincidentia oppositorum, beyond the limit of all human understanding’ (Kearney 2001: 104). But it is the desiring-production that transcends the limits of ordinary understanding and intensifies human perception: Tarot hermeneutic represents a definite, albeit schizoanalytic, method in the midst of what appears to be the madness of mysticism by virtue of creating ‘its own terms of actualization. The difference between the virtual and the actual is what requires that the process of actualization be a creation . … The actualization of the virtual … presents a dynamic multiplicity … the multiplicity of organization . … Without the blueprint of order, the creative process of organization is always an art’ (Hardt 1993: 18) – the art of Tarot readings.

Here are the key questions: How is an epistemic access to the unconscious (Platonic) ideas made possible? Whence any foundation for moral knowledge? The construction of the plane of immanence grounded in Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual enables a glimpse into an ‘unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness’ (Deleuze 1993: 95). This psychic mechanism functions as the abstract or virtual machine –yet it becomes concrete and actual via its embodiment on the material plane. Immanence is constructivism, and it is the Tarot spread that serves as the surface for the production of sense because signs ‘remain deprived of sense as long as they do not enter into the surface organization which ensures the resonance of two series’ (Deleuze 1990: 104). The actualization of potentialities is grounded in the same relational dynamics (semiosis) as the unconscious-becoming-conscious when traversing or bridging a gap represented by a ‘fundamental distinction between subrepresentative, unconscious and aconceptual ideas/intensities and the conscious conceptual representation of common sense’ (Bogue 1989: 59). Wherein the plane of immanence is being constructed, ‘the spiritual and the material [as] two distinct yet indiscernible sides of the same fold’ (Goddard 2001: 62) do meet. The plane of immanence therefore always presupposes an extra, outside, dimension – as if populated by grace. Being ‘located’ outside consciousness (non-located, in fact), it can easily appear to us as mystical. For Deleuze, however, it is Nature itself that is essentially ‘contingent, excessive, and mystical’ (Deleuze 1994: 57). Nature exceeds the observable world of physical objects and includes its own virtual dimension which, however, is never beyond experience, hence ultimate understanding.

The object of experience contains potentialities as virtual or implicit meanings, even if they are not yet actualized or made explicit. A symbolic mediation by Tarot signs creates ‘intensity, resonance … harmony’ (Deleuze 1995: 86): yet being initially imperceptible it appears to border on a direct mystical contact with the divine. The contact in question is described by means of ‘non-localizable connections, actions, at a distance … resonance and echoes’ (Deleuze 1994: 83) – yet it is the schizoanalysis of Tarot that localizes what appears to be non-localizable, therefore partaking of the alchemical marriage of the opposites, the Hierosgamos. The affectivity and intensity of experience creates the conditions for manifesting a potential human ability to raise ‘each faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise [and] to give birth to that second power, which grasps that which can only be sensed’ (Deleuze 1994: 165). This potential ability becomes our very actuality during Tarot readings when we witness the play of affects reaching ‘a point of excess and unloosening’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 134). At this crucial turning point there are two options: a subject must ‘either annihilate itself in a black hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a diagrammatic function’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 134), that is, align yourself with this very transversal link that connects the human with the divine. Similar to the drapes in fabric, things themselves are wrapped up in nature; as for ideas – they are often so enveloped or enfolded ‘in the soul that we can’t always unfold or develop them’ (Deleuze 1993: 49) by means of merely rational thinking but need an embodied schizoanalytic practice within experience saturated with the affective conditions for their unfolding. Deleuze’s transformational pragmatics takes place along the vanishing line of flight at the very limit of human understanding – yet within intensified and amplified perception permeated with erotic desire – not over and above it! It manifests at the moment when the potential meaning actualizes itself and becomes expressed by ‘the manner in which the existing being is filled with immanence’ (Deleuze 1997: 137) along the line of the mysterious conjunction with the transcendental.

Indeed, ‘immanence and transcendence [are] inseparable processes’ (Williams 2010: 94) of signs-becoming-other-signs across the transversal link that connects both is a paradoxical self-referential manner. The occurrence of the transversal communication therefore always has a numinous, religious element, especially if we read re-ligio etymologically as linking backwards to itself and forming an ‘echo chamber, a feedback loop’ (Deleuze 1995: 139) when we literally look into ourselves during the self-reflective, critical, and clinical Tarot practice. Tarot signs ‘imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, [they are] the symptoms of life gushing forth or draining away … There is a profound link between signs, events, life and vitalism’ (Deleuze 1995: 143). The shadowy signs appear to be imperceptible, enfolded in the virtual – still at the affective level, in our very skin so to speak, we can sense the silent discourse of the whispering and stuttering voices expressing secret idioms ‘defined by a list of passive and active affects in the context of the individuated assemblage … These are not phantasies or subjective reveries’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257–258). These are the expressive instances of the Jungian field of collective unconscious. The practical ‘conquest of the unconscious’ (Deleuze 1988b: 29) via laying out the Tarot cartographic map becomes imperative for our very life and survival.

The Tarot layout is a sign standing for the reality of the virtual; as such an expert Tarot reader performs ‘the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 59–60). As the included middle between the inside and the outside, it is being unfolded, picture by picture, in front of our very eyes like ‘the pieces of Japanese paper flower in the water’ (Deleuze 2000: 90) and represents both opposites in a semiotic relation which is ‘holding them in complication’ (Deleuze 2000) so that ‘Essence [as] the third term that dominates the other two’ (Deleuze 2000) finally emerges. Tarot cartographic map is a semiotic machine which ‘is installing [itself] transversally to the machinic levels … material, cognitive, affective and social . … It is this abstract [virtual] machine that will or will not give these levels … existence’ (Guattari 1995: 35). The embodiment of the transcendental field allows it to merge with its own ‘object’ that, despite always being immanent in perception, would remain disembodied or virtual and, as such, beyond actual recognition in the absence of reading and interpretation. The self-reference between the levels indicates the univocity of Being. With vocabulary bordering on alchemical, Deleuze and Guattari describe the functioning of transversal communication as ‘a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favour of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language’ (1987: 109). It is because of the desire for gnosis as the ‘compulsion to think which passes through all sorts of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and … communicated to the soul in order to arrive at thought’ (Deleuze 1994: 147) that Deleuze’s method, compatible with Bergson’s intuition, enables the reading of signs, symbols, and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience. As ‘the presentation of the unconscious, [and] not the representation of consciousness’ (Deleuze 1994: 192), it is intuition that accesses the transcendental field by means of constructing the plane of immanence and laying down the cartography of the unconscious thus bringing ‘into being that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze 1994: 147). Intuition, or noesis as an operation of the nous, represents the very depth of human knowledge partaking as such of the universal science of life, mathesis.

Deleuze’s 1946 publication called Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy (cf. Delpech-Ramey 2010; Semetsky and Delpech-Ramey 2011) appeared as a Preface to the re-issue of the French translation of Johann Malfatti de Montereggio’s work titled Mathesis, or Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge. Malfatti practiced medical science in the tradition of natural philosophy grounded in experimental practice leading to healing through the relational patterns of sympathetic vibrations. In modern times, Leibniz had envisaged a formal scientia generalis that would have established a long sought-after unity of knowledge (historically viewed as at once occult and politically subversive). This unified science of all sciences – mathesis universalis – would employ a formal universal language of symbols with symbols themselves immanent in life, in nature. Leibniz included pictures and ‘various graphic geometrical figures’ (Nöth 1995: 274) as a possible medium for such a symbolic language. Deleuze (1994) referred to mathesis in connection with an esoteric usage of calculus, claiming that mathesis universalis corresponds to the theory of Ideas as the differentials of thought. Mathesis is not opposed to art, religion, or magic but reconciles them as the unified science of human and post-human natures, thus bringing ‘nature and culture together in its net’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 236). As Deleuze points out, ‘the key notion of mathesis – not at all mystical – is that individuality never separates itself from the universal … Mathesis is … knowledge of life’ (Deleuze 2007: 146–147) communicated in symbols, signs, and images. This knowledge is achieved via

the encounter of the sensible object and the object of thought. The sensible object is called symbol, and the object of thought, losing all scientific signification, is a hieroglyph or a cipher. In their identity they form a concept . … [T]he mysterious character of mathesis is not directed against the profane in an exclusive, mystical sense, but simply indicates the necessity of grasping the concept in a minimum of time, and that physical incarnations take place in the smallest possible space – unity within diversity, general life within particular life . … If vocation defines itself through the creation of a sensible object as the result of a knowledge, then mathesis … is the vocation of vocations, since its transforms knowledge itself into a sensible object. Thus we shall see mathesis insists upon the correspondences between material and spiritual creation. (Deleuze 2007: 151)

Such correspondence is established via Tarot signs connecting the apparently incommensurable planes or levels in our practice and not only in theory. Incidentally, the symbol for true vocation, emphasized by Deleuze, in the Tarot deck is the Major Arcanum XX called Judgement (Figure 6.1). In the picture, the sound of the trumpet leads to the soul’s spiritual awakening, but also to the body’s symbolic reincarnation into new experiences and new ‘modes of existence’ (Deleuze 1986: 114). That is, we are becoming free to act in a new way, thereby making a difference in real life, thus getting closer to becoming individuated selves in the image of the next and final Arcanum called the World, in which a naked feminine figure dances inside an oval garland whose shape partakes of cosmic egg. The image of the World conveys the metaphysics of the universe akin to rhythmic movement and dance: it is world as created in a series of creative acts, not unlike the account of Genesis. The dancing female figure relates to the Dionysian mysteries, to joy and fulfilment, to soul or Anima, which is now fully integrated in the otherwise solely rational, Apollonian, world. The World is a symbol for ‘increasingly intimate correspondences’ (as Deleuze says referring to mathesis) ultimately achieving the reconciliation between man and nature, the human and the divine. The image of the World can also be related to what liberation theology refers to as the New Jerusalem, a symbol of a harmonious, peaceful world as humanity’s futuristic goal. And this goal may very well be within reach: the number of this Arcanum is XXI that, significantly, corresponds to our present twenty-first century in the grand scheme of things and collective experiences.

Mathesis, as the vocation of vocations in its ability to transform knowledge itself into a sensible, visible object, is fully accomplished in the semiotics of Tarot: knowledge is transformed into a sensible object in the form of pictures and images; yet as Janus-faced signs, they partake of the intelligible, invisible, realm of archetypal ideas. It is in this sense that Deleuze used the word ‘identity’ above; ultimately a sign, as Peirce asserted, is bound to become a sign of itself via the included third of interpretants. The process of reading Tarot images originates in the right hemisphere referred to by Deleuze (2003) as capable of interpreting the ‘language of relations, which consists of expressive movements, paralinguistic signs … the analogical language par excellence’ (2003: 93). The method of analogy that mystics around the world have practiced for centuries defies the privileged subject position of the Cogito observing the detached world of objects as an independent spectator. Mystics and poets historically played a participatory embodied role in the relational network forming an interdependent semiotic fabric with the world. The language of Tarot images is ‘intensive, a pure continuum of … intensities. That is when all of language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 98). The images are hieroglyphic in character, hence taken to be secret or esoteric; still they have nothing to hide but all to expose: their meanings can and should be deciphered or unfolded. The language of Tarot signs functions on the basis of a ‘paradoxical code [that] takes analogy as its object’ (Deleuze 2003: 95) with analogy-becoming-code in our very experience when the images are narrated, that is, translated into other, verbal, signs.

Deleuze, talking about ‘double causality’ (1990: 94), maintained that the physics of surfaces demands of events to have both causes and quasi-causes, that is, some other event ‘intervening as nonsense or as an aleatory point, and appearing as quasi-cause assuring the full autonomy of the effect’ (1990: 95) in its relation to this secondary cause. The very first sign in the deck – the Fool or Zero – seems to signify nothing and is an aleatory non-sensical point which nonetheless is still ‘present’ in each subsequent Arcanum (zero plus one is still one, etc.). Still, when the cards are distributed on the surface and organized into a semiotic structure, then

as soon as sense is grasped, in its relation to the quasi-cause which produces and distributes it at the surface, it inherits, participates in, and even envelopes and possesses the force of this ideational cause … This cause is nothing outside of its effect … it maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product, the moment that it is produced, into something productive … Sense is essentially produced. It is never originary but is always caused and derived. (Deleuze 1990: 95)

While representing nothingness or nonsense (non-sense) in the guise of a ‘floating signifier’ (Williams 2008: 72), the Fool initiates the string of meanings for the series of events. It is nonsense that functions as ‘a “donation of sense” … it generates a paradox’ (Williams 2008: 72) simultaneously defying the uniformity of meanings: sense is created anew. The meaning of each sign – each Arcanum – is derived in the semiotic, at once associative and inferential, process which is inconsistent with ‘the operation of the principle of non-contradiction as a response to paradoxes’ (Williams 2008: 71; italics in original): its paradoxical semiotic logic is a-signifying and involves two modes: one of ‘conscious cogitation and [one] with the unconscious’ (Williams 2008: 73). The Tarot plays the role of a paradoxical differentiator, a Janus-faced sign that circulates in both series, hence converging on ‘both word and object at once’ (Deleuze 1990: 51) via the extension of the mind to the level of the body, the cartography on the surface. Deleuze borrows from Leibniz the notion of differential calculus positing the unconscious ideas to be the ‘ “differentials” of thought … related not to a Cogito … but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito’ (Deleuze 1994: 194). Recollecting the fractured pieces together is equivalent to becoming, to interpreting Tarot images as signs even if their meanings, just like rhizome whose growth proceeds underground, hide in the depth of the unconscious hence appear imperceptible, invisible to the usual sense-perception.

Tarot hermeneutic reaches out ‘to the deepest things, the “arcana”, [hence making] man commensurate with God’ (Deleuze 1990a: 322). It functions as a semiotic ‘bridge, a transversality’ (Guattari 1995: 23) capable of making the apparent opposites indeed ‘commensurate’. The transversal communication between the levels – virtual and actual, consciousness and the unconscious – created by Tarot signs produces Sens, due to which our experience acquires meaning and significance because that’s when a ‘spark can flash … to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed’ (Deleuze 1995: 141). Such sparks of the Kabbalistic broken vessels are becoming gathered in the schizoanalysis of Tarot and are symbolically represented in the Arcanum called the Star (Figure 6.1). This is Aurora, the morning star immediately following the Tower Arcanum that, as a symbol of ultimate destruction, is its own dark precursor in the natural evolution of signs. As the first feminine figure in the deck stripped from her clothes as though from outlived habits and values, the Star is a symbol for creativity, for hope, for the dawn of the new Golden Age that implies a critical reversal of values (Deleuze 1983).

Deleuze’s concept of becoming-woman as ‘the key to all other becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277) that can empower even the most phallocratic of us with the creative function manifests in the feminine images in the deck such as the High Priestess, the Empress, and the Star. It was de Gébelin who was the first to associate the image of the High Priestess with the Egyptian Isis, the goddess of the rainbow as a symbolic bridge between heaven and earth, the divine and the human. The High Priestess, while possessing the knowledge of the long-forgotten lost speech used by Adam before the Fall, is reluctant, however, to let her inner knowledge be known to the world. The world, on its side, is to be ready to receive this revolutionary gnosis that went underground when forced out by the developments in positivism (or fundamentalism). It is easy to miss the messages of signs: their discourse is silent! Yet we should become attuned to the warning signs, in nature and culture alike. As Deleuze prophetically asks, ‘What is it which tells us that, on a line of flight, we will not rediscover everything we were fleeing? … How can one avoid the line of flight’s becoming identical with a pure and simple movement of self-destruction’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 38). Destratify or annihilate!

The destratifying, liberating capacity of mathesis is achieved in practice via laying down the Tarot cartographic map that speaks in the bastard language of images and signs. This language nonetheless possesses a semiotic structure never mind being ‘an esoteric or even a nonverbal language’ (Deleuze in Stivale 1998: 259), and the presence of structure assures intelligibility. Tarot cartography serves as a pragmatic tool to ‘read, find, [and] retrieve the structures’ (Deleuze in Stivale 1998: 270; Deleuze’s italics) hiding in the unconscious: cartography as a mode of diagrammatic, semiotic reason creates a visual notation for the always already ens realissimum ideas that are laid down on the plane of immanence. It is our responsibility to become-women by going beyond taboos and learning to read the bastard language of signs. Deleuze does not locate mathesis in the narrow enclave of some initiated elite; mathesis is egalitarian and democratic, situated in the midst of experiential conditions, and ‘to believe that mathesis is merely a mystical lore inaccessible and superhuman, would be a complete mistake … mathesis deploys itself at the level of life, of living man . … Essentially mathesis would be the exact description of human nature’ (Deleuze 2007: 143). The interpreter of signs who engages with mathesis in practice is ultimately a creator, an artist if not a magus, an insightful and intelligent symptomatologist who belongs to people to come. These people are themselves produced by virtue of experimentation, of becoming. They comprise ‘an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, irremediably minor race. [These people] have resistance in common – their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109–110). Resistance to the present means becoming aware of the future, to demonstrate a divinatory potential. And a glimpse into the potential future is afforded by the bricolage of Tarot as a schizoanalytic mapping of the unconscious.

Bibliography

Bogue, Ronald (1989) Deleuze and Guattari. London and New York: Routledge.

Bogue, Ronald and Inna Semetsky (2010) ‘Reading Signs/Learning from Experience: Deleuze’s Pedagogy as Becoming-Other’, in Inna Semetsky (ed.), Semiotics Education Experience (Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice 43). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, pp. 115–131.

Bosteels, B. (1998) ‘From Text to Territory: Félix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious’, in E. Kaufman and K. J. Heller (eds.), Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 145–174.

Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988a) Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988b) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990a) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990b) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale (European Perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (European Perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith and M. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and signs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (2001) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (2007) ‘Mathesis, Science and Philosophy’, in R. Mackay (ed.), Collapse III. Falmouth: Urbanomic, pp. 141–155.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (European Perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

Delpech-Ramey, J.A. (2010) ‘Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” ’, SubStance 39, pp. 8–24.

Goddard, M. (2001) ‘The Scattering of Time Crystals: Deleuze, Mysticism and Cinema’, in M. Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53–64.

Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Hardt, Michael (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jung, Carl Gustav (1953–1979) Collected Works (Bollingen Series), trans. R.F.C. Hull and eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, W.M.McGuire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [cited as CW].

Jung, Carl Gustav (1963) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York: Pantheon Books.

Kearney, R. (2001) The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Kerslake, Christian (2007) Deleuze and the Unconscious. New York: Continuum.

Laszlo, Ervin (1995) The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdisciplinary Unified Theory, Singapore: World Scientific.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Meier, C.A. (ed.) (2001) Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nöth, Winfried (1995) Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ramey, Joshua (2012) The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Semetsky, Inna (2006) Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Semetsky, Inna (2009) ‘Virtual Ontology/Real Experiences’ [July 18–21, 2009], Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion 6, pp. 169–200.

Semetsky, Inna (2010) ‘Silent Discourse: The Language of Signs and “Becoming-Woman” ’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 39, pp. 87–102.

Semetsky, Inna (2011) Re-Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Semetsky, Inna (2013) The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the art~science of Tarot. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Semetsky, Inna and J.A. Delpech-Ramey (2011) ‘Educating Gnosis/Making a Difference’, Policy Futures in Education, Special Issue: Deleuze, Pedagogy and Bildung 9, pp. 518–527.

Stivale, Charles J. (1998) The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York and London: The Guilford Press.

Williams, James (2008) Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Williams, James (2010) ‘Immanence and Transcendence as Inseparable Processes: On the Relevance of Arguments from Whitehead to Deleuze Interpretation’, Deleuze Studies 4, pp. 94–106.