The Court of the Fool

As the parade of Tarot Trumps returns in legend, we see they’ve been disguising a secret for centuries. The unhappy juggler, the throned empress, the lion tamer, the Triumphal car, the arrow wielding angels, they haven’t breathed a word of the secret. This privacy takes the form a question, the inquiry made of every tarot spread. Within the structure of the Trump cards is a singular entity, one who renders in incomplete and sets it into motion- an empty-headed Fool who has lost his wits entirely. The Fool is the grand joke of the Tarot, the trickster whose practical jokes never quite seem to come off, he is the retarded orphan left at home in ashes while the rest of the Triumphs go off to battle. He attends the Mardi Gras, Carnivale, Dias de los Muertos, the Running of the Bulls and Fasching- he is always present for one last outbreak of nonsense before the rectitude of solemnity. In Triumphal processions, he was represented by a hollow effigy created only to be burned. Wide awake and eternally vigilant, he moves through the world consuming nothing and grasping little; leaving always a disturbance in his wake. As he inhales and exhales, his silence seems to say “I am who I am not.” His is the inquiry at the beginning of every journey, a hesitation, a gasp, a sigh. His breath kindles the Tarot deck. Most tarot decks depict the Fool poised at the edge of a precipice; it appears as if at any moment he might throw himself into the void. In an earlier deck, the Gringonneur, he towers over midget human figures, the Giant of Folly (Butler, 110). It is with his divine madness that the cards are alight; for in any reading of the Tarot is the Fool who asks and the Fool who answers every question.

The errant liberty of the Foolish escapes the consecutive march of the Trumps- in the Tarot he is given over to 0, the numerical symbol for nothing. Our word for zero is derived ultimately from the Arab sifr, which means cipher. The word is translated from the Sanskrit sunya meaning “desert, empty place, naught.” (OED) In this light, 0 is a puzzle, a cipher. For how can nothing be identified as a singular entity? It stands as a placeholder, a signifier of absence. Sometimes it is nothing and at other times it is something. Place a zero in front of another digit and it might as well be invisible and unexpressed. Here the Fool leaves but a light mark on the world. But write a zero after a number and suddenly it becomes something, a transformation of magnitude. Multiply a number by nothing, and there is only nothing. Here in his suspended changeability, the Fool is potentially capable of both creation and annihilation. A point in space occupies zero dimensions, yet to be sure and certain; the point is definitively an entity. The Fool, like zero, is at once distinct and obscure- his positivity is the presence of a problem and a question. He is always oblique, a presence made of absence, a number twisted out of vacuity, a lively zero, a signifier that does not signify.

The paradoxical entity of the Fool and his zero is perhaps what Deleuze would call “the empty square” a term used express the radical underpinnings of structuralism. The dynamic capacity of an ensemble like the Tarot comes from “the place of the dummy, the place of the king, the blind spot, the floating signifier, the value degree zero, the off-stage of absent cause, etc” (LoS, 71) Here, the nothing of zero is a clear singularity. It opens the Tarot up to flux and allows the meanings of all the other cards to drift toward their eclipsed ghosts. The zero of the Fool is always already expressed in the terms and rules of the deck, but barely. As he steps toward groundlessness he is figured simply as both the gap or lack and the depraved desire for pure presence, the principle of the mobility and variety of the deck. And yet it would be ridiculous to say the Fool is nothing, the Fool = 0. Rather, he is also a clear and precise singularity; not the absence of sense but the fullness of nonsense. Nonetheless, he seems to repeat back to us the void in our being as well, almost but not quite mockingly. King Lear’s abandonment is made clear when his Fool says to him “Now thou art an 0 without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a Fool, thou art nothing.” (Act 2 Scene 4) We can also the hear the insinuation in the Fool’s declaration , the reverted echo being the reconciled cry of Borges: “The world, alas, is real. I, alas, am Borges.” (The Avatar’s Tortoise)

Here, nothingness is figured not as an empty void, but also as the production or realization of presence: a plane of real possibilities, to which all is immanent. The card of the Fool enacts both unity and nothing at all- and the precision of his operations is like a clearing in the somber opacity of the rest of the numerals or Trumps. But as a nothing, he plunges the rest of his comrades into confusion, because it is impossible to grasp his one-ness as something really distinct. Appearing as if he might simply leap into rocky chasm before him, the Fool is suspended in mid-action. And what he summons in the pose is an offering, a giving over of possibility to airy nothing. The Fool’s zero and its refracted one-ness not apprehended in terms of what is and what is not, but rather in terms of what can and cannot be. In this sense, potentiality presupposes impotentiality because if something can be, it necessarily must also be capable of not being. The figure of the Fool, the no-thing, represents the indeterminacy of this zero-state, throwing the whole seemingly closed system of the tarot into a realm of multiplicitous and unbounded potentiality. The magic of the deck is depended on the power latent in the least conspicuous of characters. A few road distractions can kill a man, a feather can ward of a hurricane. It is the context of the Fool that gives the useless scrap its power.

The number zero and the conception of nothingness have significant implications in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and in the tradition of Cabalistic mystics. In his reading of Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Agamben makes a distinction between the significance of the copyist’s enigmatic response to his employer’s orders, “I would prefer not to” and Hamlet’s more famous and resonant refrain. For Agamben, the prince’s “to be or not to be” simply points to an opposition between being and non-being (Agamben, 259). Bartleby’s phrase points to a third term beyond mere nothingness and mere existence. For Agamben, this term is potentiality. Here, we can understand this term to mean the state of infinite suspended possibilities of what one can and can not do. Agamben identifies here a potentiality that can only be fully recognized in the potential not to. In this sense it is from the nothingness of potentiality that all creation issues forth. Early Cabalistic mystics coined the term Ein-Sof (Infinity) to describe the unknowable-ness of the Divine Creator. The first steps in the manifestation or actualization of God is called ayin, or nothingness. The Cabalists saw God as turning towards creation, so as Ein-Sof (or infinity) actualizes itself, it turns to face both ayin and creation at the same time (Scholem, 94). Speaking of the Cabalistic notion of a nothing from which everything proceeds, Agamben points out that the “obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. The art of creation is God’s descent into the abyss that is his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and not to” (253).

But it is the will of God that turns towards creation. Bartleby’s potentiality differs in the sense that when a lawyer asks “You will not?” the scrivener corrects the statement in reply with “I prefer not” (Melville, 2211). Like Bartleby, the Fool dwells so stolidly in the abyss of impotentiality/potentiality without ever willing to leave it. His zero comes not from a will to nothingness, but an affirmation of what might become in the opening of this nothing.

It is a common tradition for practitioner of Tarot as divination to remove the Fool from the deck before shuffling- he takes the place of the Querent (the person who receives the reading) or the Significator (the question of reference for the spread). Here the Fool is figured always as a question, always posed as “if?” The Querent and the Fool’s question a “if” forever offers an invitation to all possible deviations of chance. To be willing to answer is not the same being able to ask, and it is in this disjunction that pure potentiality lies. The Fool’s great secret is no more than the excess of the question. Hovering on the brink of a gulf overlooking the endless ocean, he offers potentiality up to the groundless ground, the desolation of primordial earth, the loss of sense. The zero is that clean opening of the question onto the yet to come - not any answer, real or possible, but that space of difference drawn by the desire to ask, to bring forth something else.

For the magicians in the legends of Tarot and for the new-age occultists of the contemporary tarot market, the Trump symbols are the distillation of an effort; a will for preservation; for the consistency of the symbols and their permanence. For them, the symbols are powerful because they are universal. Yet perhaps the gamblers and betters of Renaissance Europe knew better: chance was the emphasis at the heart of the Tarot’s divinatory powers. Because the cards in a divinatory spread and a game are laid out randomly, everything in the deck exists only as a combination. Here the stolid categories of the earth (air, fire, earth, water, masculine, feminine, complete, incomplete, past, present, future, night, day, internal, external, beast, angel, human, anguish, ecstasy, depravity, fortitude, beginning, ending, desire and fear) no longer exist except as pure differences, pure elements of an entirely novel ensemble of disparities. The trumps, upon their Triumphal return, are no longer identical to what they had been. Always they differ from themselves at least twice, first through the historical determinations of the cards’ use and the interpretation of the image, and second through always being implicated in a unmarked combination that renders their meaning their anew. ]

The movement of the Fool unto itself, or the return of One to the void, is the arrival at an always new combination of potentials. The zero perpetually forgets and remembers the one, the fool's invisible friend. . Through this forgetting or subtraction (1-1=0) , there is a gain- potentiality seems nothing more than the sweet sublimity of forgetting. The zero is teeming with life. Here, just on the brink of the Fool’s oblivion, lightly flutters the possibility of the intimately infinite.

By virtue of the mathematical property of identity (a=a), it is only zero’s selfsameness that constitutes its position as the subject of a return. It is circular or spherical because by virtue of this self-sameness, it can do nothing but return to itself as a nothing, the preservation of potential. If memory can lose something, it does so without remainder since what it loses does not and could not have presence except in remembering. Forgetting impels the Fool to improvise, to imagine possibilities in the space of a void. Rather than containing “real memories” of the one essentially and inexorably lost, oblivion is constituted by its forgotten multiplicities, virtual memories of what could have been remembered but was not, ghosts of slight anticipations. At the moment we perceive any singular card, something of its pure virtuality is at once irrecoverable, zeroed-out. The Fool is a loss in which nothing is lacking, a loss that cannot retain itself as loss because it simply is there, without hollowing out anything we might wish to fill. The subtraction of one from itself, this forgetting of the one, this is the Fool’s modus operandi. He protects his own oblivion.

What does it mean to have zero as a principle of unification? For the Fool, whose element is air, the zero is a giving over to airy nothing, a surge of lightness that corresponds to an escape from the spirit of gravity, or simply the spirit of escape. We are reminded of Huck Finn, Gilgamesh, Dean Moriarty, and Don Quixote. Each deck of cards seems to interpret the Fool differently, a testament to his variability and permutational potential. For the case deck, he is the breath of the beasts in the fields; for the Crowley Douglas deck he is the limitless light prior to all creation. The sadhu decks view him as an arrow in direct but wavering light; for Rider-Waite he is the spirit in search of experience and the sensitive life of the flesh. (B,113). In all interpretations, the Fool is without weight or grounding- he is the pure thrown-ness of human life. deck, he is the subtlety of the “original impulse.” In the Grimauld, thoughtlessness and carelessness; for the knight deck he is the innocence of chaos. In the Buddhist deck, the Fool corresponds to all possibilities of movement. In all cases he is the groundless ground.

For many tarot readers, the Major Arcana, or the Trump Deck, is also known as “The Fool’s Journey.” To be clear though, the Fool card itself represents the moment just before the journey, the anticipation of the yet-to-come, the apprehension of all possibility and limitless choice. The Fool is in absolute relation with the outside, because being faced with infinite choice in this suspended potentiality, choice is never the decision of this or that, rather the Fool’s is the choice to choose, the choice between choosing and not choosing. In the moment of subtracting oneself and making oneself vulnerable only to that which is not-self, the Fool attains the empty place where, seized by impersonal powers, we are made let thought exist through us. Unlike the other cards he is not the spontaneous effusion of a particular trait, a gesture toward the symbolic. Instead the thoughtlessness of the Foolish is only the power won, with the greatest trouble, against language, being detained by the world’s play.

The Fool forges a new kind of intimacy with the world- not one which attracts certain bits of the world to one’s self and thus implies determination and choice, but one whose impersonality suggests a kind of restless mischief in a field where actuality has been temporarily dissolved. This mischief is the same as the waywardness that takes place in a daydream or idle fantasy. The limitless choice bearing upon the Fool upturns the self as yet another possibility among several. The endless and errant hesitation of the Fool before the adventure emphasizes his position as a question, a problem, a wondering. The Fool’s question is a release from the confines of a need for narrative closure or finality, a tactic used by him (and the Querent) to perpetuate, postpone, or defer. The pause before the onset of his becoming is a process of dissolve- of scattering, breaking away, softening. The drift is the condition of potentiality. After all, what is erotic is not necessarily the exposure of hidden flesh, but the possibility of its revelation. (Barthes).

For the Fool, the decision is subtracted from the choice, the answer from the question, creation from the limitless light; the direction of the quest is subtracted from itself, a mind minus thought, leaving only a hovering zero that overspills from its middle. For Deleuze, this principle of n-1 is at the heart of any system of difference like the Tarot, one which has multiplicity and proliferation as its formal principles. For the Fool, it is both the uniqueness of the home and the unity of the destination that are subtracted, leaving only a zero, a frame for nothing, left. The principle of n-1 is cyclical because as “unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, a new type of unity triumphs in the subject” The cycle is never done, shut, or terminated. Instead, it is ceaseless invented and re-invented as the desire that drives the Fools question morphs as the differing drifts; the n and the one evaporate and congeal, over and over again in an eternal game of hide-and-seek. In card zero, we see the endless difference of the Journey has been momentarily stalled or hushed, by the wind- leaving just the Fool, a univocal anticipation. The triumphal unity is only the selfsameness of the zero, the winged life of the wind, the stillness of the Fool, the equivocation of all possibilities to a pause or a chasm.

To illustrate: Hindu priests think the Vedas to be a transcription, a translation, a dilution of a single syllable- the first breath of Sarasvati, Goddess of Poetry. On the banks of the Sarasvati River, around 1500 BC, priests composed this Hindu chronicle we now know as the Vedas. Around 500 years later, the river had vanished- and its goddess became the river of loss and memory- like the Sarasvati River, a quite real, but invisible source of sound. Sarasvati, like all Hindu gods, has many names: the River Goddess, She Who Lives at the Front of the Tongue, The Power of Memory, She Who Lives in Sound. Most of all, she is the Disappeared River.

Badiou says that “ A truth begins with a poem of the void, continues through the choice of continuing, and comes to an end only in the exhaustion of its own infinity.” (HfI 56) When the Querent or the Fool ask a question, the Tarot responds with a poem. The mystery at the surface of the cards scintillates the same desires that enter into the operations of poetry. The Tarot does not ask to be interpreted, nor does it possess any keys. It simply demands that we delve into its operations. Like a poem, a tarot spread is an event. It takes place. In order to be free with the mystery of limitlessness and chance, the Fool and the querent must dispose themselves to the operations of the spread- literally. The reader must will his or her own transliteration. The anxiety of the exhaustion of infinity, or total completion returns to the suspended fullness of potentiality in the place of the void. The spread reveals itself as a constellation to be translated, brought home. This desire for transliteration, originating in a lack and persisting toward eternal completion is for the Fool is that originary impulse of poetry: breath or exhalation.

Prayer, chant, mantra, formula poem: all are constructs of breath’s energy, attempts to recover that originary force of sound- the naming of the unnamable. The Fool’s poetic impulse, the call to limitlessness is always, as might be expected, yoked to the past. This is because the breath of the Fool is an opening of an originary poem to listening ears- a hymn to, and dream of, his vanished or invisible river, the lost and unexploded time of a Beginning. For Confucius, the past only represents the achievement of a terrestrial order (reflective of the cosmic order) which has never again been accomplished but could be. His nostalgia for his own lost Sarasvati, the river of Poetry and Memory, is neither wanting (we have lost the originary river) nor unstable (we may have our river, but it someday too will be lost). Nostalgia for the Fool is instead a celebration of his own archaic beginning, the moment of anticipation in which the beginning is already being remembered.

A poem without its own archaic, in other words a poem that is eternally still and without a sense of home, can only exist at the time when poetry no longer needs to be written, when it has “exhausted its own infinity,” when the world ends. The Fool’s poem will reminds us that on his journeys, the only ending is a longing for an ending. The saturation of existence by this double desire for the originary and for the yet to come testifies to the constant manifestation of the zero that only anxiety reveals. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through the Foolish, only slightly in those who are restless, imperceptibly in the “Oh, yes” and the “Oh, no” of all the Trumps; but most readily and most assuredly in those who are basically daring: the Fools, the readers, the questioners. The anxiety comes from the demand of the journey: this depends on you. In the luminous net of relations that the Tarot makes, up the slightest change- even watching- transforms it all. The anxiety of the Tarot is the anxiety of waiting, blindly for the next thing. The anxiety reminds us that the Fools journey is a potentially nightmarish one too. We laugh at the Fool because he makes us uncomfortable; there is a part of us that is disgusted by him. His whimsy boomerangs and guts itself, his adorable frailty skews toward the grotesque. It is no wonder that the Tarot invokes such widespread fear and anxiety: it potential to upturn anything and everything rests solely on that twist of the moment, disproportionate relationship between the seriousness of the Querent and the indifference of the cards’ systematics. It is the anxiety for the terrible thing that has already occurred, the feeling of being swept away by the silence of something that might happen.

Even the exhalation of the fool is love struck- the sighs that his voice elicits is clearly akin to the impassioned exhalations of the swoon, the prolonged breath of nonsense that is decidedly erotic. For Barthes perhaps puts it best when he says that “for the lovers’ anxiety- it is the fear of a mourning that has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment I was first ‘ravished.’ Someone would have to tell me, Don’t be anxious anymore, you’ve already lost him/her. ” (LD, 30). the Fool, the beginning of the affair is already remembered, the end is also already mourned. The paralysis of the zero place is the nervousness caused not just by disappearance or nihilation, but also by the fullness of the heart, its indifference to choice, the chanciness of all risk, the burden of every possible outcome. His poetry is the agonizing reminder that included in the limitless potentiality of infinite things is always the Fool’s own heartbreak, paranoia and longing.

The Fool is making the greatest risk- he frivolously wagers everything for the abyss. The stabbing suddenness of the Fool’s antics wrests from somewhere inside us a flickering weakness; we are dizzied by his daring tricks. He is utterly without grounding, and as such his existence is disproportionate to the rest of the Parade of Trumps: lighter, more humorous, and less ironic than life itself. He is reminiscent of both a pathetic underdog, a dummy effigy forsaken by the Parade, and a heartbroken, inchoate lover, the sitcom jokester; yet something alight leads him on. We can call this the eternal return, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche and Deleuze. The operation of the Fool card is the eternal affirmation of chance, Foolishness, wild imagination. Of course a home is implicated in all journeys, but in the Tarot the only home is precisely the univocal consistency of potentiality; that is, the selfsameness of zero. The flip side of coming apart from oneself is that all that is available in this bold feat is, again, a part of oneself. The voice that is let speak is not an entirely foreign one. When we attempt to shuffle ourselves into a new structure, the place we arrive is still always already prefigured back home. What the Triumphal Procession returns to is the unique and univocal affirmation of risk, the “yes” that makes the risk of battle worth taking.

To pose the question “if” is to take that risk, to bring matters about to an originary place of pure possibility, where any and all answers could suffice. As such, the maudlin antics of the Fool card sets into motion the play of the all, the lightness of thought, the insistence of laughter in the face of the sublime. The ontological principle of the eternal return is precisely that there can be no model, no essence, no identity, of that which returns, and that everything exists only in combinations whose internal principle is difference. The 'same' things exist as such only in returning, in being repeated with a different sense, freshly determined by some new combination of contradicting wills.

What returns in the eternal return of the Triumphal procession is every thing, but only the extreme form of every thing; every thing returns to zero only insofar as it is capable of being radically transformed, insofar as it goes to its limits rather than resting within them. The forms or senses of kings, stars, lovers, demons, seashores which have stable identities, immutable essences, natures already determined, are abolished in the Fool’s instant of chance, of the single question that re-works the assumptions at work in the cards. Even if the parade of trumps were to be struck dead by some divine force of destruction, they would still return, not even as an absence but as the persistence of chaos, the eternal moment of the bottom dropping out. This is thanks to the particular eccentricities of the Fool Every time the cards are re-shuffled and dealt into another novel spread, the fool returns to a place of stalled repose. We are reminded again of the mages in Morocco, the gamblers and betters of the Renaissance courts, the Hindu priests on the banks of the Sarasvati River: “shoring up ruins” against absolute impending loss.