“Before the After Comes the Fire”: Tarot Aesthetics as Feral Inquiry

In this article, we propose envisioning the tarot as an artful inquiry rooted in encounters with chaos and contingency. As a postfoundational approach to qualitative research, the tarot invites more questions than answers. The creation of tarot card art and card-readings together serve as a powerful heuristic of feral aesthetics. This article documents how creation and reading of a specific tarot deck unfolded at a conference and affected those who engaged in the process. Tarot-readings evoke posthuman affective processes that entangle the soul, thought, emotion, and action. The feral aesthetics of the tarot’s artful inquiry is marked by turbulence, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Tarot-as-inquiry articulated here blends archetypes, meanings, and assemblages of self and world into desirable fictions. As artful inquiry, tarot can thus shape perception of the present and future helping readers better navigate present desires and situate themselves in more desirable imagined futures.