Concept
Charisma
The magnetic centrality generated by a display of deferral beyond the onlooker's capacity
Ask AI about Charisma“This is the point of Philip Rieff’s notion of “charisma”: the magnetic effect of a display of deferral and discipline beyond the capacity of the onlooker, in which one oscillates between exploiting the “leader”’s vulnerability and taking him as a model for engaging one’s own inner scene (an inner scene revealed for the first time through the example of the charismatic).”
From the Archive
“The individual you see resisting temptations you give way to and controlling impulses you are overpowered by has power over you—you will defer to him because you know that your own indiscipline (revealed to you by this example) blinds you to cause and effect, good and bad, and that the more disciplined individual will have more insight into these matters.”
“This is charisma, in its original sense, according t Philip Rieff: divine grace perceived in a person who has transcended desires that are compulsive to others.”
“Rieff has a book entitled Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us (very cheap on Amazon or AbeBooks), and he argues that charisma was originally a product of abstention and self-discipline--the one who could withstand temptation better than others, obey a higher imperative, exercised the power of charisma (which really means "gift") over his fellows.”
“Hence the paradox of the charisma emanating from such moral innovators, and the power, wealth and prestige that accrues, if not to them, than to those who most credibly “inherit” their “kingdom of ends.””
“The sacred that charisma usurps is necessary to humanity, but it can easily be turned to less than noble ends.”
“The charismatic shaman differs from the unindividualized officiant of Ritual in that the first recreates the scene from the sacred center whereas the second stands in the center as the emissary of the periphery.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Charisma names a specific mechanism by which centrality is generated rather than occupied. Its bearer disciplines and restrains himself past the point the onlooker can reach; that surplus of deferral becomes visible as an example, and the onlooker, in whom it "reveals" an inner scene "for the first time," oscillates between exploiting the leader's vulnerability and modeling himself upon it. In the original sense the GA writers take from Philip Rieff, this is "divine grace perceived in a person who has transcended desires that are compulsive to others" — charisma "was originally a product of abstention and self-discipline," the power exercised by "the one who could withstand temptation better than others, obey a higher imperative." This distinguishes charisma sharply from the occupation of the political center or the accumulative bigness of the big man: it is a "paradox of the charisma emanating from such moral innovators," a centrality won through renunciation, whose "power, wealth and prestige" typically accrues not to the innovator but to those who inherit his kingdom of ends.
The concept is doubled. Modernity, at the Weberian turning point, reverses the polarity so that charisma comes to mean "the transgression of the established, the secure, and the accepted" — the same magnetic form of self-command, now attached to breaking norms rather than obeying an imperative. Because charisma converts renunciation into attention, it stands close to the sacred it borrows from: Gans warns that "the sacred that charisma usurps is necessary to humanity, but it can easily be turned to less than noble ends," as when celebrity or the "anti-sacred of resentment" distills it. Its scenic logic is explicit in the shaman, who "recreates the scene from the sacred center," making charisma the individualized re-generation of the center as against the periphery-serving officiant of ritual.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“The central object of desire is sacred for being at once attractive and repulsive, desirable and taboo, whereby center and circumference regenerate each other dynamically via the active and passive relations of desire, as it issues from the originary gesture of deferral. This logical anomaly conforms to notions of the sacred that we discover in every…”
“I think that power is simply a display of discipline greater than those impressed by that display consider themselves capable of. I’m drawing here, as I have often done, on Philip Rieff’s theory of “charisma,” the original meaning of which (exemplified by Moses) he took to be obedience to a higher imperative manifested in extraordinary levels of…”
“Anti-social defiance of norms can inspire generative modes of inquiry that yield fruit before the social effects of that defiance become evident. Transgressive charisma did not decisively break the virtuous circle whereby the discipline of the elites depended upon and saw to the discipline of the emergent middle and lower classes until recently, when the…”
“He must end up transgressing this established order because in it lie the seeds of the new, more disciplined one, and he will do so by reversing the scale of values and empowering the most piggish of the bunch. This is the modern, post-Weberian meaning of charisma: the transgression of the established, the secure, and the accepted. The two modes of…”
“All talk of centrality must come around to being talk of resentment as well. In Gans’s account of the originary scene, resentment kicks in immediately after the center is secured through the issuance of the originary sign. Mimetic desire leads to the crisis; resentment comes in its wake, as the center now forbids us from satisfying our desire for the object…”
“The disciplines claim knowledge of the mind, the social, religion, customs, the state, beauty and so on, as things in themselves, while for the disciplinary space of originary thinking the practices given these names are all representations by those on the margins of the center. The study of this practice of representation is what I have been calling, on…”
“A particular “fork” confronts us in embarking upon the path any imperative places before us. Since the center is occupied by, has been “usurped” by, a human, every human comes to model him or herself on that occupant by demanding some form of centrality him/herself. Being the recipient of an imperative places you at a center with, therefore, some power to…”
“I guess what the contemporary world allows is for a situation where one’s victimhood accords one centrality – and moreover, the only way to claim the centre is to present oneself as being on the margins. I don’t think it’s always admitted or even an explicit strategy. I have a lot of friends in the arts – directors, actors, writers – and almost all of them,…”
“It’s like imitating someone very closely—he raises his arm, you raise yours, he kneels, you kneel, he jumps, you jump—you need to be very focused in order to follow him, and that is our relation to the center, which we are, in fact, imitating from the beginning by participating in preserving the space the center opens up for us. Now, it’s possible to say…”
“The sacred that charisma usurps is necessary to humanity, but it can easily be turned to less than noble ends. Whence the need to avoid letting our thinking be dominated by spokespeople for Wokism, whose charisma distills the anti-sacred of resentment. The one deadly sin The point of calling these web essays “Chronicles of Love and Resentment” is that if…”
Key Texts
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