Essay: The Flamboyant Provocations and Confessions of a Hedonist Sinnner
Niko Čajič explores Robert Pfaller’s critique of contemporary Western society as presented during his appearance at the 2025 Mesto Knjige literary festival. In his latest work, What’s Worth Living For, Pfaller condemns the asceticism of modern culture and its “war on pleasures,” from smoking bans to moralizing wellness trends. While acknowledging Pfaller’s sharp insights, the essay diverges from his wholesale rejection of discipline, arguing instead for the value of self-restraint and moral structure as sources of meaning and strength. It situates Pfaller’s thought within a broader debate on pleasure, prohibition and hypocrisy in an age of digital surveillance and algorithmic morality.
Niko Čajič

While Didier Eribon served as the official headliner of the literary festival Mesto Knjige in Nova Gorica – the European Capital of Culture 2025, twinned with the bordering Gorizia – it was Robert Pfaller, who emerged as a main star of the penultimate day of the festival, drawing crowds that even rivalled those of the festival’s main star. The highly charismatic Viennese philosopher and cultural theorist took the stage with his colleague Mirt Komel as moderator to present his latest work, What’s Worth Living For, which was presented on the Slovenian market of intellectual commerce by translator Ana Monika Habjan and published by Studio Humanitatis in 2020.

Pfaller decided to open the night with a jeremiad against Western society and its political and cultural elites, denouncing their declared war on what he calls “irrational pleasures”. Here and in his earlier writings, Pfaller glowered with special hostility at the enlightened technocratic rulers who believed  themselves to be immune to the self-deceptions of the naive masses, casting suspicion on everything from cigarettes to sex, champagne and other simple pleasures. Smoking bans, one of his favourite examples, are transformed from public-health measures into symbols of a new, almost puritanical culture of prohibition. His visit at the festival could not be more timely. As of recently, French citizens are no longer allowed to smoke in public parks, on beaches during the holiday season, at bus stops and on any street near a school, playing field, gym, library and swimming pool. A country which ironically self -mythologised itself through glamourous chain smoking, joie de vivre attitude and effortlessly cool “it girls” who love to smoke, drink and fuck their ugly boyfriends in their nipple-protruding tank tops (RIP Jane Birkin). 

This suspicion, Pfaller argues, also thrives on the so-called “ascetic Left”, a faction eager to stigmatize anything glamorous, irrational or indulgent as wasteful consumption of scarce resources. He points to the Bologna Process as one such example, which in his view has stripped universities of academic freedom and robbed students of the joy of learning. He blames “subaltern leftists” who, frustrated in their own academic lives, take revenge on the system with harsh efficiency programs. Pfaller’s diagnosis recalls James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which contrasts a hedonist Christian against a Calvinist zealot brother. Guided by the devil in disguise, the Calvinist starts killing whoever challenges his moral superiority, including his faithless brother. He embodies the psychological costs of believing oneself uniquely saved by Grace, illustrating how an uncompromising vision of righteousness can deform a person into the very thing they abhor – a sinner whose “justification” becomes self-damnation. For Pfaller, The Calvinist has now returned as the archetypal neoliberal subject of contemporary Euro-American culture. Steeped in a Protestant ethic of self-optimization, today’s ego-worshipper is a relentless ascetic, obsessed with perfecting body and soul alike – a devout consumer striving for control and mastery by faithfully following the rigorous regime of self-discipline while remaining incapable of being wholly engulfed by happiness. Behind this transformation, Pfaller detects a broader neoliberal project – the suppression of uncommodified pleasures so that they can be repackaged, monetized and sold back at a premium price. By discouraging spontaneous or “irrational” enjoyment, society channels desire into marketable, socially-sanctioned forms.

Here, I personally diverge from Pfaller. While modern day fitness and wellness culture deserve its fair share of criticism and snobbism alike, his analysis conflates religion with the modern-day therapeutic ethos and underestimates the pleasures that can arise from discipline and refusal. Or in my own words: “saying yes by saying no”. Rather than wholeheartedly dismissing contemporary obsession with body sculpting and self-discipline as mere neoliberal biopolitics, we should examine the deeper drives and gratifications they offer. Only then can we truly understand why so many experience these not as oppressive but personally liberating. As American critic George Scialabba wrote for the Boston Review: “Muscular strength is built gradually, for example by overcoming the resistance of progressively heavier weights. Moral and psychological strength also require resistance—the pressure of cultural interdicts, dictating what is not to be done or even thought of. Such discipline simplifies our lives and economizes our energies.” Without an unquestioned moral framework rooted in guilt, fear and faith – one that cultivates obedience, trust and dependence  – there can be no spiritual hygiene, no collective purpose. This is precisely what the therapeutic revolution renders impossible. Today’s “religious psychologies of release and social technologies of affluence,” as Scialabba puts it through Philip Rieff, “do not go beyond release and affluence to a fresh imposition of restrictive demands. This describes, in a sentence, the cultural revolution of our time. The old culture of denial has become irrelevant to a world of infinite abundance and reality.” In the absence of strict, even harsh limits, we cannot thrive, he concludes the paragraph. 

Of course, Pfaller as a true Freudian understands this perfectly. He does acknowledge that unconstrained remissions, when applied too consistently, become decivilizing (so do interdictions when applied too rigidly). He is against the state of permanent excess but for ritualized and bounded transgression. This makes him closer to a hedonist Christian as described in Hogg’s novel – “a happy bigot” who knows when to play along, when to let things slide, and how to enjoy a good night out. For Jan Verwoert, unlike the Calvinist brother, “the Catholic’s moral inconsistency makes him an agreeable fellow”, though I disagree as this is what Catholicism is all about. For the German idealist thinker Friederich Schelling, Christianity was the revelation of the hidden original peace that had always pertained between Cronos and Dionysius – a paradoxical link that has always existed between peaceful order and wild festivity (just look at the Italians!). This makes Pfaller surprisingly less of a faithful follower of Althusser, Lacan, Spinoza, Mannoni and Zizek, and more of a theorist of public space, and his most famous work, On the Pleasure Principle (2014), a rather surprising rearticulation of Michel Foucault’s essay on heterotopias Of Other Spaces (1984). According to Foucault, heterotopias are spaces with distinct rules and temporarily suspended hierarchies that exist on the social and cultural margins of society. These spaces, such as brothels, monasteries and fairgrounds to name a few, offer their inhabitants the opportunity to transform themselves, or at least temporarily suspend who they usually are by submitting to alternative relationships to time and social order. Heterotopias also serve its conservative politics, protecting the dominant social order by deflecting the forces of change by locating them outside society in specially designated spaces where social critique (theatres), foreignism and non-matrimonial sexuality housed in motel rooms and challenging ideas (libraries) can be filtered and contained. 

Yet this emphasis on transformative spaces leaves open the question on the moral economy of those who occupy them. Verwoert, for instance, ends his essay on Pfaller by questioning the supposed innocence of the “happy bigot” as bigots can relax and transgress in peace because the dominant social order shields the privileged from the consequences of their indulgences that would get lesser-ranking employees fired. “I know fully well how lame it is, but why would I sleep with my wife when I can fuck my secretary?” The bourgeoisie’s charm, after all, is called “discreet” for a reason. What Pfaller leaves largely unexamined, however, is the structural link between private duplicity and public hypocrisy, and how individual “double-heartedness” is sustained by institutional double standards.

Now, a decade later, with the rise of online gossip culture and the expansion of a global digital village which is now increasingly governed by the dictates of algorithmic justice, the surveillance state is catching up to the rich and powerful as well, as seen in the recent ‘Coldplay cheating scandal’, in which a CEO’s affair with his secretary (the company’s chief public officer, to be exact) was revealed to the world after posing intimately together and then frantically separating after being spotted on a kiss cam at a concert. The scandal not only went viral on social media but led to relentless mocking, bullying and eventually the firing of the two involved. Perhaps the sadism and cruelty unleashed by this event call for a new ethics of privacy, demanding that Big Tech reshape its algorithms accordingly. Perhaps what we truly need are new taboos to protect us against the judgment of the mob and resist this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon. Or, in the spirit of Foucault or Pfaller, perhaps what we truly need is to cultivate greater self-restraint, until we find our way to the “American motel” where we can relax in peace and sin a little, and where no one will ever know.

Niko Čajič is a screenwriter, critic and essayist who works internationally. He studied fine arts, specializing in the sexual politics of German fascism. He is a great film enthusiast.

Photo: Luka Mavri