ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Inna Semetsky draws parallels between the axiom of the third-century alchemist Maria Prophetissa (‘One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth’), which Jung refers to as a metaphor for the process of individuation, and Deleuze’s paradoxical logic of multiplicities (problematic Ideas) – both of which are based on the notion of the tertium quid, the included third. Semetsky argues that the reading of signs is an experiment that involves experiential learning (self-education or apprenticeship) and, ultimately, self-knowledge in the form of deep gnosis. Only through such knowledge can we become in-dividual, ‘whole’ selves. Semetsky’s chapter also addresses ethics as the integration of the Jungian shadow archetype that may manifest in events of which, according to Deleuze, we must become worthy. To conclude, Semetsky presents an example of a transformative, healing (‘making whole’) practice that demonstrates the actualisation of the virtual archetypes via their ‘dramatisation’ in the esoteric yet ‘real characters’ of a neutral language, such as envisaged by Wolfgang Pauli, Jung’s collaborator on the concept of synchronicity. By means of such a practice, for Semetsky, Deleuze’s call to retrieve and read the structures immanent in the depth of the psyche is answered: we self-transcend by becoming-other.
