Phoebe Collings-James, The Magician, 2021. Edition produced on the occasion of Collings-James’ exhibition A Scratch! A Scratch! at Camden Art Centre. Courtesy of the artist and Camden Art Centre.
Invited to write about the figure of the Card Reader in Walter Benjamin’s early text “Fate and Character” (1921), I drew a single card from a shuffled tarot deck, and got the Magician. This essay attempts to use the Magician card as a tool in a reading of Benjamin’s ideas about cards, readings, and fate. It applies Benjaminian understandings of associative, analogous, allegorical, and archetypal thinking to practices of cartomancy. It draws on various aspects of the Magician card and the mystical Marxist’s thought, including games and divination; tricks and tricksters; memes and mimetic faculties; juggling and infinity. It also follows Benjamin and the Magician toward an understanding of fate that is not singular, not final, and not the opposite of will.
Published in Diacritics (Volume 52, Number 4, 2024).