Charisma in Eroticised Political Formations

Abstract

Emptying oneself of one’s self, thought or opinion, even at the price of pain, offering one’s own body to suffering, these features marked the extraordinary senselessness and inner determination of the liminal, as Turner says about the communitas, giving liminal authorities the capacity to transmogrify initiands outside the boundaries of reality and meaningful conduct, a capacity that comes only from breaking the association of reality with ratio. In liminality, the essential fabric of social life is eradicated, being swapped for surrealistic desires and wills. Effervescence always occurs, the outburst of emotions, but meaning often fails to materialise in rites, as basic and sensuous passionate interests only widen the distance from the social, and so the rite produces an ever more absurd level of devotion to a cause without any comprehensible principle. The reason for the initiands’ dedication becomes blurred, only mad beliefs and ill desires keep proliferating, calling always for more passionate interests and for the giving up of the sanity of one’s mind, where for every trick there is always a new ritual pretext gaining legitimacy and then legalisation. In such cases the completion of the liminal stage, instead of reaggregation, simply means that the initiands become themselves stalkers, scum and cheating figures, by now completely assimilated into a bullying system.