Michel Chaouli
Poetic Charisma
Charisma is an idea that elevates rulers and diminishes the ruled. It erodes equality and props up hierarchy, and it does so by taking recourse to a noumenal entity that seems designed to elude the grasp of analysis and comprehension, perhaps even of description. No surprise that it is repugnant to those who champion forms of social life founded on equality and the accountability of the powerful. But this concept can be revelatory if it is transposed from persons to things and from the political realm to the poetic. Apart from whatever utility it may have in the sphere of politics, charisma, specifically in the articulation given by Max Weber, turns out to disclose key features of poetic power.
Michel Chaouli teaches in the Department of Germanic Studies at Indiana University and directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, which he helped found. He has been named an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, to direct a research project called “The Philological Laboratory: Models of Criticism Beyond Critique” from 2018 to 2020. His intellectual interests focus on aesthetic theory, literature and philosophy, and ways of communicating intensive encounters with art, usually around texts from the German and European tradition beginning in the eighteenth century. Recent publications: Thinking With Kant’s Critique of Judgment (2017); Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature (Co-ed., 2021); Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticsm begins (2024).