Robert Pfaller: theorist of public grace

An aesthetics of delegated enjoyment? Sure. An escape from prevailing ideologies? Indeed. An exposure of capitalist commodified happiness? Check. A key to understanding the paradoxes of our cynical-hedonist era? Absolutely. Robert Pfaller’s disquisition on interpassivity is all that its back flap promises, and more. But reading this new book, and rereading earlier publications, make me believe that there is something else brewing in Pfaller’s heterodox writings – something that is perhaps less in line with the image we have of a cultural theorist taking his bearings from Althusser, Lacan, Spinoza, Mannoni and Zizek. Something more – forgive me philosophers – of a sociological nature. I believe we can also read Pfaller as a theorist of public space. Or, given his predilection for graceful acts of enjoyable togetherness, we can read him more specifically as a theorist of public grace.