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Page 27
from a connection to another. One is reminded of that game that consists in shifting from one term (say, peg) to another (say, Plato) in no more than six steps. If the game allows for every possible connection (be it metaphorical, metonimical, phonetic, or other) one can always win. Let us try: PegpigbristlebrushMannerismIdeaPlato.
Contrary to contemporary theories of drift (see below, section 5), Hermetic semiosis does not assert the absence of any univocal universal and transcendental meaning. It assumes that everything can recall everything elseprovided we can isolate the right rhetorical connectionbecause there is a strong transcendent subject, the Neoplatonic One who (or which), being the principle of the universal contradiction, the place of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, and standing outside of every possible determination, being thus All and None and the Unspeakable Source of Everything at the same moment, permits everything to connect with everything else by a labyrinthine web of mutual referrals. It seems thus that Hermetic semiosis identifies in every text, as well as in the Great Text of the World, the Fullness of Meaning, not its absence.
Nevertheless, this world perfused with signatures, ruled, as it pretends, by the principle of universal significance, results in producing a perennial shift and deferral of any possible meaning. The meaning of a given word or of a given thing being another word or another thing, everything that has been said is in fact nothing else but an ambiguous allusion to something else.
In this sense the phantasmatic content of every expression is a secret, or an enigma that evokes a further enigma. The meaning of every symbol being another symbol, more mysterious than the previous one, the consequence is twofold: (i) there is no way to test the reliability of an interpretation, and (ii) the final content of every expression is a secret.
Since the process foresees the unlimited shifting from symbol to symbol, the meaning of a text is always postponed. The only meaning of a text is "I mean more." But since that "more" will be interpreted by a further "I mean more," the final meaning of a text is an empty secret.
Thus Hermetic semiosis transforms the whole world into a mere linguistic phenomenon but devoids language of any communicative power.
4. Hermetic Drift and Unlimited Semiosis
The very idea of such a continuous shifting from meaning to meaning can evoke (at least for those who are hermetically eager to play with

 
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