Semiotica 2016; aop

Inna Semetsky*
Monstrous hermeneutics: Learning
from diagrams
DOI 10.1515/sem-2016-0121

Abstract: This paper addresses a theory/practice nexus represented by a semio-

tic system of Tarot pictures as iconic signs. Tarot will be analyzed from the
perspective of Charles S. Peirce’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies. Tarot func-
tions as a diagram or the included third between “self” and “other,” which are
traditionally taken as binary opposites. It thus partakes of the “monster” as a
grotesque and ambiguous category that betrays a strict boundary between
habitual dualisms, such as mind and world, consciousness and the uncon-
scious, human and divine. While Tarot is usually perceived as irrational and
illogical if not altogether “monstrous,” it is the logic of the included middle that
enables its functioning. Genuine signs have a triadic structure that includes
interpretants crossing over human and non-human natures. The process of
reading and interpreting Tarot signs represents specific hermeneutics and con-
stitutes exopedagogy as an alternative form of education partaking of a posthu-
man dimension. As indices, Tarot pictures refer to the whole gamut of human
experiences, and the hermeneutics of Tarot allows us to evaluate experience and
to learn from it.

Keywords: Tarot, exopedagogy, icons, Deleuze, Peirce, logic of the included

middle

1 Introduction
The focal point of this paper is a specific practice of reading and interpreting the
iconic signs comprising the semiotic system of Tarot. As demonstrated by
Winfried Nöth (2014), icons are signs that make human experience come alive;
especially the icons of relations such as diagrams. Diagrams are semiotic “tea-
chers” (metaphorically) because they alone convey new information. This paper
presents a layout of Tarot images as a diagram foregrounding the empirical
practice of interpreting the information it conveys as a kind of hermeneutics. As
indices, Tarot pictures refer to the whole gamut of human experiences, and the

*Corresponding author: Inna Semetsky, Institute for Edusemiotic Studies (IES), PO Box 304,
Hampton 3188, VIC, Australia, E-mail: irs5@columbia.edu

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2 Inna Semetsky

hermeneutics of Tarot allows us to evaluate experience and to learn from it. The
Tarot system is not illogical or irrational, even if it is traditionally perceived as
such and can easily appear as belonging to the category of the “monster.” To
prove this point, the paper will juxtapose the thoughts of two philosophers,
Charles S. Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, and will specifically focus on their
approach to logic.
Hermeneutics is not reduced to the interpretation of verbal texts but applies
to any semiotic systems such as symbols, images, or cultural artefacts with the
aim of discovering their deep and hidden meanings. Etymologically, the Greek
words hermeneuein and hermeneia for interpreting and interpretation are related
to the mythical god Hermes, a messenger and mediator between gods and
mortals, who crosses thresholds and traverses boundaries because he can
understand both languages even if they appear totally alien to each other. As
a practical method, Tarot hermeneutic allows us to create meaning for existen-
tial situations and events comprising human experiences.
For Peirce, the whole universe is perfused with signs, the action of which
comprises semiosis as the evolutionary process of signs being translated into
other signs due to the inclusion of the third category of an interpretant. Logic as
semiotics is paradoxical, analogical, and grounded in the included third,
included middle. Genuine signs are triadic and have a relational, folded struc-
ture. Gilles Deleuze had an analogous approach to semiotics. His semiotics is
“a-signifying,” that is, in need of “transversality” as a conjunction playing the
role of the included middle between what would otherwise remain two isolated
binary opposites. Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental empiricism is informed
by the logic of multiplicities that function as signs due to transversal commu-
nication, akin to Peirce’s interpretant between the apparent binary opposites. At
the ontological level the conjunction can be established between two levels of
reality (both real): virtual and actual. At the psychological level, a connection
can be established between consciousness and the unconscious. Ultimately, a
bond is established between nature and mind.
Tarot hermeneutic is enabled by a transversal link between the material and
spiritual planes of existence. In order to unfold, read, and interpret the signs of
experience we need to learn their language. The implications are profound,
leading to the connection (at once immanent and transcendent) between “self”
and “other” (other minds, Nature, God) in real practical life and in accord with
the “monstrous” logic of the included middle. It is when habitual dichotomies
are under threat or become suspended, such as the categories of us versus them,
destruction versus production, inside versus outside, or mind versus body in the
tradition of Cartesian substance dualism, then “monster appears as an important
conceptual category” (Lewis and Kahn 2010: 2). Monster is at once a signifier for

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 3

the breakdown of boundaries but also indicates the taboo against the breaking
of such boundaries of common sense or socio-political realities alike. The inter-
pretation of Tarot signs, symbols and images becomes an unusual form of
pedagogy: exopedagogy.

2 Exopedagogy of images
Exopedagogy is a specific form of posthumanist education that defies anthro-
pocentrism. This radical form of cultural, experiential, and post-formal peda-
gogy transgresses the boundaries of narrow rationality and takes education out
of its habitual bounds (Lewis and Kahn 2010). Exopedagogy is “located” in
culture, in experience, in life; as such it partakes of Nietzsche’s gay science
that affirms life rather than neglecting the alternative possibilities for/of life and
education. As a form of exopedagogy, Tarot edusemiotics opens up multiple
possibilities that would have remained unknown and underexplored if not for its
“monstrous” hermeneutic. The monster is a symbol for the demonic alien, the
generic other, an a priori excluded foreigner or stranger; a figure of “radical
difference” (Lewis and Kahn 2010: 74). Contrary to the integrative, Eastern mode
of thought, mainstream Western philosophy has suffered long enough from the
“great bifurcation” (Merrell 2002: 54) between body and mind. Tarot, however,
as continuing the legacy of alternative Western tradition, namely Hermetic
philosophy (Semetsky 2011), elicits vast implications for our practical life and
education by healing the split produced by Cartesian dualism that affords no
room for the category of the included Third. The included middle is indeed
monstrous from the viewpoint of dualistic thinking and analytic philosophy of
verbal language. The concept of the “monster” serves as the major qualifier to
designate a precise line of division between what both Cartesian dualism and
the scientific method of modernity (that by and large still inform contemporary
educational theory and research methodology) posit as binary opposites, such
as human and non-human.
Exopedagogy allows us to escape quantitative measures and disciplinary
forms associated with pre-fixed norms, thereby problematizing the notions of
norm and normal altogether. The borderline between normal and abnormal,
between rational and irrational, between human and non-human becomes
blurred. The mode of being a “monster” is paradoxical: a figure of exclusion,
it is also included, albeit as an outsider, a hidden variable, not unlike the
mystical tertium. The tertium non datur is a feature of the classical logic of the
excluded middle. For modern Western thought historically “there could be no

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4 Inna Semetsky

tertium quid” (Merrell 2002: 204) defined as something of uncertain or unclassi-

fiable nature, which is related to, but distinct from, two things perceived as
opposite. What enters the paradoxical space that opens when the dualism
between binary opposites such as human versus non-human, self versus other,
is abolished or at least suspended is the elusive tertium that resists “the lure of
the anthropological machine” (Lewis and Kahn 2010: 74). Such a “no-man’s
land” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293) – that nonetheless is embodied in the
layout of images – is indeed located in-between habitual categories of dualistic
discourse. It is an ideal place for the multiple signs-becoming-other implicated
in Tarot icons that form a relation between “self” and “other,” and creates an
unusual pedagogy as an open-ended hermeneutic practice of pragmatic tools,
psychological interventions, and artistic expressions.

3 Tarot hermeneutic
The centrality of relations is a distinguished feature of semiotics: signs are
relational, Janus-faced, entities that need to be interpreted in order to acquire
meaning. The interpretation of Tarot signs – what in common parlance is called
Tarot readings – enables the understanding of their meanings “by a personal
effort of progressive elucidation through several successive levels, i.e., by a form
of hermeneutics” (Faivre 1994: 5). A typical Tarot deck consists of seventy-eight
pictorial cards called Arcana. The world Arcanum means that creative, yet
hidden from view, element in our lives, which is necessary to know, to discover
in experience so as to be fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-
tasks situated in the midst of experiential situations and our complex relation-
ships with others. In contemporary academia where analytic reason rules, Tarot
is commonly ignored; with the exception of the recently deceased famous British
philosopher of language in the analytic tradition, Sir Michael Dummett. His
research focused on Tarot “history and mystery” and presented it as mainly a
cultural game. Antoine Faivre, however, in the course of his monumental
investigation into Western esoteric tradition (Faivre 1994) positioned Tarot in
the framework of Hermetic philosophy, tracing the latter from its ancient and
medieval sources to Christian theosophy up to twentieth-century physicists as
the “gnostics of Princeton and Pasadena” (Faivre 1994: 280). Faivre referred to
Tarot as one of the forms of secret, esoteric, Gnostic, knowledge. According to
him, “Tarot, a specific art... is a subject of extensive literature, both scholarly
and popular, and increasingly suffuses our culture [and] through a hermeneutic
of situations and characters, it... opens out upon a gnosis” (1994: 96).

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 5

Russian philosopher and mathematician Peotr Ouspensky posited Tarot

primarily as a metaphysical system indicating the threefold relation between a
human soul, the physical or phenomenal world, and the world of ideas or the
noumenal, divine or spiritual, world (Ouspensky 2008). Another Russian philo-
sopher, Valentin Tomberg, the author of a “magisterial work” (Faivre 1994: 98)
devoted to the meditations on the twenty-two Major Arcana of Tarot in the light
of Christian Hermeticism (published as Anonymous 2002), cites sources as
diverse as Plato, St. John of the Cross, the Hebrew Zohar, Bergson, Ouspensky,
Leibniz, and St. Augustine as representatives of the mystical, Hermetic form of
thought. Tomberg presented each Major Arcanum as a practical lesson, a lesson
in learning per se. In his Afterword to the English edition of Tomberg’s opus, the
late Vatican Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar considered the twenty-two images
of the Major Arcana to be the expressions of the all-embracing wisdom of the
Catholic Mystery, while tracing its history back to the revival of Greek, Arabic,
and Jewish philosophies during the Renaissance, followed by the accommoda-
tion of Hermetic and Kabbalistic teachings into Biblical and Christian thought.
Relating Tarot, following Tomberg, to Jungian archetypes, von Balthasar
pointed out the objective character of the psyche – what Jung called the collective
unconscious – in terms of the “principles of the objective cosmos” (in Anonymous
2002: 661) akin to Biblical “powers.” Von Balthasar emphasized the certainty
provided by Tarot symbolism with regard to “the depth of existence [where]
there is an interrelationship between all things by way of analogy”
(in Anonymous 2002: 663). Hermeticism embraced the principle of interdepen-
dence, analogy, or correspondences between phenomena, that is, the relational –
semiotic – worldview. Yet many correspondences are unseen or “veiled” and
require our subjective effort to read and interpret them as the signs of experience
so that they begin making sense for us.
The in-between relations appear hidden, secret, and hieroglyphic, altogether
uncanny if not plainly monstrous; they need to be deciphered or interpreted in
practice. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, edited by Thomas Sebeok,
indeed presents Tarot readings as an example of divinatory practice and
describes taromancy as belonging to “a branch of divination based upon the
symbolic meaning attached to individual Tarot cards... interpreted according to
the subject or purpose of a reading and modified by their position and relation
to each other from their specific location in a formal ‘layout’ or ‘spread’” (Sebeok
1994: 99). But this definition appears partial: rather than interrogating the
centrality of the conscious Cogito, it seems to strengthen it by stipulating an
apparently willful “purpose.” At the same time, it positions Tarot in the frame-
work of mantic arts by grounding it in the supernatural, and not natural,
dimension of human experience. The process-ontology of relations, however,

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6 Inna Semetsky

defies the perceived boundaries between the human mind and the natural
world.1 The ontological turn in the history of hermeneutics indeed problema-
tized epistemology as a starting point, while the postmodern hermeneutic of
sacrality (Tracy 1981) discovers the nature of the sacred at the level of human
experience, thus blending the human and the divine.
Importantly, the encyclopedic description of Tarot readings as above under-
values the process of semiosis – the name given by Charles S. Peirce to the
process of signs’ evolution, transformation, and growth – which is invaluable for
understanding the dynamical structure of the Tarot sign-system (cf. Semetsky
2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2009, 2013) and its functioning across the habitual schism
between dualistic opposites that succumb to the logic of the excluded middle.
The following recourse to Peirce’s and Deleuze’s philosophies, although brief,
will lay down a necessary foundation so as to position Tarot in the framework of
edusemiotics and provide a logical explanation to the practice of Tarot readings,
which has been historically considered paranormal, irrational, and illogical, that
is, outside reason – just like the proverbial monster.

4 Peirce’s logic as semiotics

Peirce classified all signs in terms of basic categories of Firstness, Secondness,
and Thirdness and provided examples across psychological or ontological
levels of description: “In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction
Second, General conception Third, or mediation.... Chance is First, Law is
Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second,
Evolution is Third” (CP 6.7). The mind-body relation is thoroughly semiotic:
because matter (Second) is effete mind (First), mind (First) has to be
entrenched in habits (Thirds) so as to congeal into matter (Second).
Peircean holism implies a coordination or analogy between the two different
aspects of one total process: matter is mind, yet whose habits became so fixed
and rigid that there is no way for the “mind” in question either to take a new
habit or break an old one. The categories are described in numbers that are
cardinal (not simply ordinal, like the sequential first, second or third). Habit-
taking as an evolutionary process (the cardinal Thirdness) includes Firstness in
the form of chance, feeling, creativity, novelty, or freedom as a necessary
condition of its own dynamics. Because thought always takes place by virtue
of the action of signs, logic as semiotics is “treating not merely of truth, but also

1 The full theory of naturalizing Tarot is conceptualized in Semetsky (2013).

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 7

of the general conditions of signs being signs” (CP 1.444). For Peirce, logic is a
science of the necessary laws of thought and cannot be reduced to the logicians’
invention; there is ratio in nature. He refused to “conceive of the psychical and
the physical aspect of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct” (CP 6.268).
A genuine (as opposed to degenerate) sign has a paradoxical three-relative
structure (Figure 1) in which a triad as “the relation-of-the-sign-to-its-object
[itself] becomes the object of the new sign” (Sheriff 1994: 37). By virtue of the
inclusion of interpretants, Peirce’s semiotics defies a classical tertium non datur
principle, the law of the excluded middle.

I
(Interpretant)

S O
(Sign) (Object)

Figure 1: A genuine sign.

Thought-signs, in addition to symbols, include “pictures or diagrams or other

images (I call them Icons) [and] signs more or less analogous to symptoms (I call
them Indices)... The substance of thoughts consists of these three species of
ingredients” (CP 6.338). A perfect sign blends all three semiotic elements, so that
image (or icon) is always present (as Firstness) in the products of consciousness
such as concepts expressed, in the final analysis, in verbal language. In addition
to the two modes of logical inference, deduction and induction, there also exists
a specific kind of hypothesis-making, abduction, which proceeds below con-
sciousness. Being subconscious, it nonetheless has its own logical form: a
surprising fact is observed; but if our hypothesis of this fact were true, then
this fact would be a matter of course; therefore there is reason to suspect that
our hypothesis is true.
The abductive guess borders on intuition, intuitive knowledge in the
Cartesian tradition being a synonym for immediate, direct knowledge. But in
semiotic terms, knowledge is always indirect, mediated by the included middle
of interpretants; so the process of forming concepts as Thirdness must include
the Firstness of abductive guesses partaking of intuition, insight, and imagina-
tion (cf. Semetsky 2005, 2011). An unorthodox perceptual judgement, triggered
by abduction “comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight” (CP 5.181), which is

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8 Inna Semetsky

fallible but still has a power “of guessing right” (CP 6.530) even while being pre-
conscious and not rationally controlled. Abduction is a logical category; yet it
partakes of intuition when the latter is understood not as an immediate
Cartesian intuition but as a paradoxical “mediated immediacy” (CP 5.181).
In the context of Tarot edusemiotics, intuition functions literally as learning
from within (in-tuit), accessing potential meanings immanent in the psyche, in
the unconscious. We should also remember that intuition in the Transcendental
tradition was used to describe an ineffable, mystical experience of identification
with the divine. Peirce indeed acknowledged the somewhat “occult nature”
(CP 5.440) of the unconscious, “of which and of its contents we can only
judge by the conduct that it determines, and by phenomena of that conduct”
(CP 5.440), that is, by its effects at the level of our lived experience. He noticed
that “The first premise is not actually thought, though it is in the mind habi-
tually. This, of itself, would not make the [abductive] inference unconscious. But
it is so because it is not recognized as an inference; the conclusion is accepted
without our knowing how” (CP 8.65). Peirce commented that the “insight of
females as well as certain ‘telepathic’ phenomena may be explained in this way.
Such faint sensations ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assidu-
ously cultivated by every man” (Peirce and Jastrow 1884, in Hacking 1990: 206).
An insight into the meanings of Tarot images accords with Peirce’s diagram-
matic reasoning when an authentic reader interprets the cards’ meanings and by
passing “from one diagram to the other... will be supposed to see something...
that is of a general nature” (CP 5.148). These ontological generals are real signs,
independently of their having been already actualized in one’s experience or
not. Reality is not reduced to the actual, in fact “the will be’s, the actually-is’s,
and the have-been’s are not the sum of the reals. They only cover actuality. There
are besides would be’s and can be’s that are real” (CP 8.216), even as “would-
be’s” and “could-be’s,” they belong to the semiotic realm of the virtual. In the
hermeneutics of Tarot, the implicit meanings of experiences (occurring in the
past, present or possible future) are “altogether virtual [and contained] not in
what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in
representation” (CP 5.289) – such as when becoming embodied in iconic signs
comprising a Tarot layout in the form of a visible, actual object.
The semiotics of Tarot not only demonstrates the reality of the virtual but
also makes the invisible visible, thus putting into practice one of the postulates of
the ancient Hermetic philosophy. It is the included Third of interpretants
involved in the deciphering of images that “brings information... determines
the idea and gives it body” (CP 1.537) in our actual, physical world. Each Tarot
image is “an Icon of a peculiar kind” (CP 2.248); and laying down the Tarot
images performs the semiotic function of “rendering literally visible before one’s

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 9

very eyes the operation of thinking in actu” (CP 4.571). The mediation provided
by means of the laid out Tarot images “connects” two supposedly opposite
dimensions of immanent and transcendent, above and below, consciousness
and the unconscious, human and non-human, that is, the generic “self” and
“other” as two complementary poles of the always already Janus-faced signs
embedded in the evolutionary process of semiosis (Figure 2).

Tarot

Self Other

Figure 2: The included Third of Tarot.

The meanings implicit in the unconscious become explicated or unfolded when

expressed in the pictorial language of Tarot images. Le Pli (in French) is translated
as the fold, an extremely important concept in the context of Tarot hermeneutic
and one of the central notions employed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

5 Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental

empiricism
For Deleuze, “intentionality of being is surpassed by the fold of Being, Being as
fold” (Deleuze 1988a: 110), and “we go from fold to fold” (Deleuze 1993: 17) in
the evolutionary process of becoming-other akin to Peirce’s semiosis: signs
unfold and grow in meaning; hence they become other and “more fully devel-
oped” (CP 5.594) signs. Deleuze posits the virtual field of becoming, which is as
real as the actual plane of manifested phenomena. Ontologically, the object of
experience is “given” only in its tendency to exist or, rather, to subsist in a
virtual, potential form. Still, virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming
actual through the double process of different/ciations of the transcendental and
“initially undifferentiated field” (Deleuze 1993: 10). Deleuze’s empiricism is
radically transcendental because the very foundations for the empirical princi-
ples are left outside the perceptions of common sense. There exist subliminal

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10 Inna Semetsky

micro-perceptions that are subject to the cartographic microanalysis (schizoana-

lysis) of establishing “an unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the
perceived in consciousness” (Deleuze 1993: 95).
The “other in me” (Deleuze 1988a: 98) is always implicated or enfolded
because of the analogical relation between a rational, conscious thought and the
unthought, or unconscious dimension of experience. Deleuze (1995) cites French
author Henri Michaux, saying “Children are born with twenty-two folds. These
have to be unfolded. Then a man’s life is complete.”2 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).The number
twenty-two – the twenty-two folds – corresponds to the number of Major
Arcana in a Tarot deck, from The Fool to The World (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Major Arcana. (Note: Illustrations are by artist Pamela Colman Smith from the
Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. © 1971 US Games Systems, Inc. Reproduced with permission; further
reproduction prohibited.)

2 In Negotiations 1972–1990 (1995), Deleuze’s quotes on the twenty-two folds are from The
Space Within by Henri Michaux, in The New Directions Series, printed in France by Henri
Marchand & Company. Michaux’s book was first published by Gallimard in Paris in 1944
under the title L’Espace du Dedans and then appeared in English as Selected Writings: The
space within (translated, with an introduction by Richard Ellmann).

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 11

Deleuze purports to show the as-yet-imperceptible by laying down a (visible)

map of the (invisible yet intelligible) territory or, in other words, creating a
mediatory link, the included Third, belonging to the family of “non-localizable
connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 83) between sensible and intelligible,
matter and mind. Such a non-local, semiotic connection acquires “locality” via
its very embodiment in the Tarot layout. Referring to psychophysical paralle-
lism, Deleuze asserts that there must be a threshold that brings thought to the
body. At the ontological level, the same relation exists between the virtual and
the actual – both real – the connection between which would require construct-
ing a semiotic “bridge, a transversality” (Guattari 1995: 23), which is created in
practice by means of unfolding the meanings of experiences expressed via the
pictorial language of Tarot icons. Deleuze would have agreed with Lacan that
the unconscious is structured like a language, but the very concept of language
is transformed: rather than being reduced to strictly verbal propositions of the
conscious mind, it becomes “the marriage of language and the unconscious”
(Deleuze 1990: xiii) as the expressive means of Tarot edusemiotics. A genuine
semiotic structure, allowing for reading and interpretation, is here: “be it an
esoteric or even a nonverbal language” (Deleuze 1968, in Stivale 1998: 259) such
as dreams, memories, or Tarot images.
Borrowing a concept of the diagram from Peirce, Deleuze (1995: 33) says that
everything has “its cartography, its diagram.... What we call a ‘map,’ or some-
times a ‘diagram,’ is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand
are a map).” If the lines in a hand form a map, so does the Tarot diagram in the
format of a typical layout, such as the Celtic Cross shown in Figure 4.
Each position in a typical spread has some specific connotations and the
images are interpreted in the context provided by each position. The positions
also denote the time element, thus granting an experienced reader an epistemic
access to all three dimensions of time: past, present and the potential future
coming into being. We thus achieve an expanded perception of space and time
as a “pure reserve” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156), in which both are “released
from their human coordinates” (Deleuze 1986: 122) reduced to three spatial
dimensions and merely chronological time. What we observe in Figure 4 is the
embodiment of what Deleuze called the plane of immanence that “does not
immediately take effects with concepts... and its layout resorts to measures that
are not very respectable... or reasonable” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41): it is
pre-rational and a-conceptual, ultimately enabling “the conquest of the uncon-
scious” (Deleuze 1988b: 29) when its structure becomes visible in the double
process of constructive-expressive synthesis.
The layout of Tarot icons – the plane of immanence – “belong to the order of
dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and

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12 Inna Semetsky

Figure 4: The Celtic Cross spread.

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). This unseen, implicate order (cf. Bohm 1980) can be “seen” only indirectly,
with the help of mediation by the included third of interpretation:

It is like in music where the principle of composition is not given in a directly perceptible,
audible, relation with what it provides. It is therefore 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 unconscious “belongs to the realm of physics” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983b:
283), to the natural world. Still, such a world isn’t inhabited by substantial things:
complex Nature (with Capital N) is always already “perfused with signs, if... not
composed exclusively of signs” (CP 5.448). As relational, signs are what Deleuze,

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 13

following Bergson, qualified as qualitative, nonmetric, multiplicities. The logic of

multiplicities, being a-signifying (that is, defying any a priori, unmediated, sig-
nifier-signified identity), demands tertium quid to achieve the mystical coincidentia
oppositorum between what since Descartes were considered to be separate sub-
stances of mind and matter, res cogitans and res extensa. What we perceive as
binary opposites are reconciled by virtue of the process of semiosis; thus making a
transcendental relation in fact immanent in perception. As Deleuze scholar James
Williams points out, “immanence and transcendence [are] inseparable processes”
(Williams 2010: 94).
What is traditionally called a mystical, over and above human understand-
ing, experience thus becomes a practical art of perceiving the otherwise imper-
ceptible or becoming aware of the unconscious as a distinguished feature of
Tarot edusemiotics. Deleuze (1989) describes such an experience as a sudden
actualization of potentialities, that is, awakening of perceptions by raising them
to a new power. Such an event is future-oriented and requires specific affective
conditions (as Peirce’s Firstness) necessary for the actualization of the virtual.
These conditions construe Kairos seized in the event of Tarot readings when “the
body plunges into the virtual or spiritual depths which exceed it” (Goddard
2001: 57). The edusemiotics of Tarot enriches human experience with its spiri-
tual, partaking of divine dimension. It is the embodiment of the transcendental
field in the medium of Tarot that allows a sign to merge with its object, which –
despite always being immanent in perception, would remain disembodied or
virtual and, as such, beyond actual understanding in the absence of the reading
and interpretation.
The plane of immanence is constructed not just in our minds as an abstract
entity, but is sure enough laid down in our physical reality in its concrete,
embodied form. As Deleuze points out, “immanence is constructivism, any given
multiplicity [a sign] is like one area of the plane” (Deleuze 1995: 146). This radical
statement corresponds nicely with the Tarot diagram forming an area on the plane
while constructing a specific topology of events and experiences in the layout of
pictures. The logic of the included middle is equivalent to what Deleuze describes
in terms of the conjunction “and” intrinsic to multiplicities. The logic of multi-
plicities is not “subordinate to the verb to be.... Substitute the AND for IS. A and B.
The AND is... the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their
terms” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 57) in the dynamic process of becoming in
contrast to static being. The conjunction “and” establishes transversal commu-
nication between two different planes that would have remained forever isolated
in the framework of dualistic philosophy. Yet, the semiotic logic of the included
middle presents those as “two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109). The self-referential, triadic relation between

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14 Inna Semetsky

virtual-actual or conscious-unconscious indicates the Univocity of Being, ulti-

mately manifesting in “the bond of a profound complicity between nature and
mind” (Deleuze 1994: 165).
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... We witness the incorporeal
power of that intense matter, the material power of that language” (1987: 109)
that reaches to the deepest meanings of experience: such is the embodied,
material language of Tarot signs. This language is a true outsider, a stranger.
For too long it has remained “oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical... irremedi-
ably minor” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109–110); hence appeared to be fitting
well into the category of a monster. It sure is a foreign language because
typically we don’t understand it. Significantly, it is “masterpieces [that] are
written in a kind of foreign language” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 98). In relation
to Tarot hermeneutic, the adjective “monstrous” proves to be misleading: a
semiotic bridge created by Tarot on the basis of the logic of the included middle
appears foreign or even monstrous only to the narrow rationality of the
Cartesian subject who valorizes habitual dichotomies and remains in the comfort
zone at its own side of the border. Deleuze’s logic is definitely not one limited to
the verbal “language. It is a description of the [semiotic] structures that appear
when being is understood as the encounter of events and series” (Williams 2008:
23). This is logic as semiotics pertaining to diverse regimes of signs in excess of
verbal language. Still the pictorial nonverbal language of Tarot signs would
have remained meaningless if not read and interpreted.
While on the surface the phenomenon of Tarot indeed appears paradoxical
and irrational if not altogether monstrous, its perceived status fades once we
understand that the semiotic logic of the included middle demands two opera-
tive modes: one with “conscious cogitation and [one] with the unconscious”
(Williams 2008: 73). A genuine reader becomes an edusemiotician, a pedagogue
who reads and interprets the language of the unconscious that finds its expres-
sion in the imagery and, by translating it into verbal propositions, creates a
meaningful narrative as a form of hermeneutics.3 Such is the semiotic exopeda-
gogy of Tarot: learning from diagrams. The unorthodox lessons that, according
to Tomberg (Anonymous 2002), are reflected in the Arcana, are founded on our
becoming aware of many affects and moods representing the depth of the
unconscious.

3 Disclaimer: I refer here exclusively to my experience as a Tarot reader of two-and-a-half

decades (in addition to my academic credentials) and by no means intend to implicate other
readers or “advisors” as they sometimes call themselves.

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 15

6 Learning existential lessons

Contemporary semiotician Eero Tarasti (2001) posits anxiety as a problem of
the semiotic subject who may face, according to the tradition of existentialism,
either being or nothingness. What many people bring to their readings is in
fact a number of existential problems even if they often lack the words to
express their concern with a particular situation or a significant other. Not
being existential philosophers or semioticians, they may remain in denial
about the real state of affairs. The signs of anxiety may be well hidden,
while deep inside they tend to create an affective, symptomatic – hence,
indexical – world of reality. Tarot images “imply ways of living, possibilities
of existence, [they are] the symptoms of life gushing forth or draining away”
(Deleuze 1995: 143). These symptoms are explicated in the Tarot layout func-
tioning as a “line of becoming [that] comes up through the middle” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 293) – the included Third between (existential) being and
nothingness. Each image embraces its own original and as such silently carries
on Peirce’s paradoxical self-referential refrain “I says to myself, says I”
(Merrell 1992: 185) as if creating a powerful dialogue between consciousness
and the unconscious, between “self” and “other,” especially when this “other”
becomes one’s very “self.” As Peirce said, “Your self of one instant appeals to
your deeper self for his assent” (CP 6.338). Semiotic subjectivity has a dialogic
form because “His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying
to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time” (CP 5.421). It is
via Tarot hermeneutic that we can become conscious of the yet unconscious
subtle dialogue with our “selves-becoming-other” in the flow of semiosis. It is
when people as subjects acquire the opportunity to self-reflect, to become
objects of their own signs via their representation in Tarot Arcana that a
novel meaning can be created: the meaning for existence amidst the often
stressful life-events that can bring forth anxiety or depression.
Among the Arcana there are indeed those carrying existential motifs such as
feelings of insecurity, anger, depression, frustration, anxiety, confusion, “pain
in the neck,” exhaustion, being overwhelmed, indecision, etc.; and the practical
method of Tarot hermeneutic brings those affective states into sharp focus.
According to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, “the meaning and essence of every
conception lies in the application that is to be made of it” (CP 5.532) at the
level of human experience, in our very practice. The language of Tarot signs
functions on the basis of a “paradoxical code [that] takes analogy as its object”
(Deleuze 2003: 95): analogy-becoming-code in our very experience when the
images are interpreted and their meanings become relatively fixed for each

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16 Inna Semetsky

specific context. As noted by Nöth (1995), the term “code” entered semiotics via
the terminology of information theory. A semiotic code serves as a relative
“correlation or correspondence between sign repertoires or signs and their
meanings” (Nöth 1995: 205). Nöth points out that “analogic coding [pertains]
to pictures, models and nonverbal signs” (1995: 208); still, during the interpreta-
tion of a particular message communicated by the combination of Tarot images,
such analogic coding becomes digitized when image is translated into word
because “ultimately every act of semiosis involves a digital transformation of
messages” (Nöth 1995: 208).
A predominance of any one suit (how many cups cards, or wands, or swords,
or pentacles) in the spread may indicate the person’s general mental and emo-
tional status. What is her dominant affect? Is she emotional? Is she at her
intellectual best or worst? Is she in touch with her feelings? What mood does
she demonstrate? Does she have any insight? What bothers her most: an earthy
practical matter or a heavy emotional burden? Each image can be interpreted at
the variety of levels, interpersonally or intra-psychically. Tarot signs combine
together to form complex stories just like words and sentences; and there cannot
be a single meaning attached to a particular card. Signs are polysemic and
context-dependent. Sure enough, a “flat image or, conversely, the depth of
field, always has to be created and re-created – signs... always imply a signa-
ture.... All images combine the same... signs, differently. But not any combina-
tion’s possible at just any moment: a particular element can only be developed
given certain conditions” (Deleuze 1995: 49) as a function of concrete situations,
subjectivities, and events. Tarot pictures are laid down in the process of mapping
the depth of the psyche and “suggest[ing] ‘highs’ or periods of depression”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983a: 70) at the subtle, affective level. Importantly, signs
(or multiplicities) possess an intensive capacity “to affect and be affected”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvi) – thus to become other signs during the herme-
neutic process of interpretation. As signs among signs, we learn from experiences
embodied in pictures and also become other and more fully developed signs –
such is the essence of Tarot edusemiotics and the pedagogy of images.

7 Conclusion: The edusemiotics of images

as the pedagogy of love
The process of interpreting Tarot signs depends on “reading with love” (Deleuze
1995: 9). Affect, Love, Eros! Whatever the name, this is what functions as an
abductive “compulsion to think which passes through all sorts of bifurcations,

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 Monstrous hermeneutics 17

spreading from the nerves and... communicated to the soul in order to arrive at
thought” (Deleuze 1994: 147), to achieve understanding, to become aware of the
unconscious. Our cognitive faculties are inadequate to access the immaterial and
virtual realm of the unconscious signs, if not for their representation in the
materiality of the pictures that trigger abduction and intuition and therefore can
raise “each faculty to the level of its transcendent exercise... [when it] attempts to
give birth to that second power which grasps that which can only be sensed”
(Deleuze 1994: 165). It is only through love and compassion for the often suffering
human spirit and the desire for deep Gnosis that a genuine Tarot reader can intuit,
understand, and narrate the deepest symbolic meanings of signs, which become
explicated or unfolded, thereby constituting “the fragments of ideal future [and]
past events, which [would] render the problem solvable” (Deleuze 1994: 190). The
problem in question is an existential event or a moral dilemma that demands
letting go “of the constraints of habitual responses” (Kevelson 1999: 15) in ever-
new experiential contexts.
The art of Tarot readings belongs to the right hemisphere capable of interpret-
ing the “language of relations, which consists of expressive movements, paralin-
guistic signs... the analogical language par excellence” (Deleuze 2003: 93). This
nonverbal, esoteric language of signs partakes of “the veiled presentiments of the
Logos” (von Balthasar in Anonymous 2002: 659) and is symbolized by Major
Arcanum II, called The High Priestess, a feminine image. Plato’s Republic tells
the story of prisoners living in illusion among the shadows on the walls of the cave
while remaining unaware of the bright light produced by the sun as the metaphor
for real knowledge. The semiotics of Tarot parallels the prisoner’s journey towards
the sun, to which he is drawn by his love for light, for wisdom hidden in the High
Priestess’s scroll. It is significant that in Plato’s Symposium, Diotima the Priestess
teaches Socrates that a spirit or daimon by the name Eros or Love is located in-
between two opposites, lack and plenty: it is the included middle, indeed.
Daimons are neither human nor divine, and from a human perspective they are
not far from monstrous. Yet, as a daimon, the winged Eros can hold the opposites
together as one coordinated harmonious whole, therefore functioning as the
included middle capable of reconciling that which analytic thinking habitually
perceives dualistically.
Julia Kristeva refers to Diotima as the “great priestess... the wise stranger
[who] dictates to Plato the ideal, idealized, and in that sense ‘Platonic’ concept
of love” (Kristeva 1987: 71). In contrast to the male-dominated structure of
possession-love, the priestess epitomizes a “more feminine and maternal”
(Kristeva 1987: 72) attitude partaking of Peircean evolutionary love, Agape, in
the creative evolution of signs permeating the cosmos itself. Watts (1958) com-
ments that modern theologians used the Greek words eros and agape to

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18 Inna Semetsky

distinguish between hungering and generous love; agape is ascribed solely to

God because of the “fallen nature of man... [l]acking divine grace” (p. 117).
Peirce referred to the principle of Agape as part and parcel of the creative,
non-mechanical growth of signs whenever “spontaneity is set free” (CP 6.301).
It is love that fills us with the feeling of mutual “solidarity – almost identity –
with other creatures [when we] begin to understand the meaning of compassion”
(Watts 1958: 109), such compassion enabling a genuine Tarot reader to respond
to people’s anxieties by bringing to awareness the meanings implicit in the
images (Semetsky 2011).
For Peirce, agapism is a cosmic principle. Sympathy, analogy, likeness, love
pervade the semiotic world just like in Hermeticism; the edusemiotics of Tarot
allows us to bring sympathy into our culture. Peirce considered a creative genius
to be one who acts agapastically, that is, puts into practice agapism as the law of
love operative in the world that evolves due to “the immediate attraction for the
idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of
sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind” (CP 6.307). It is this
continuity punctuated by love that we become able to experience in the creative
process of unfolding Tarot signs and unveiling their hidden meanings.
Exopedagogy is impossible without Agape that can spread among participants
in creative evolution. Peirce’s synechism calls for “recognizing germs of love-
liness [even] in the hateful” (CP 6.289) as if confirming their best potential. In
this respect the generic “other” stops being a polar opposite that the isolated
“self” habitually perceives in fear and trembling and is eager to assign a status
of the monster. Fear and trembling can be transposed into an intensified,
spiritual experience and lead to self-other integration. The proverbial monstrous
beast can become beautiful by virtue of love.

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