THE DIALECTICS OF ANTIAUTHORITARIAN REASON by Robert Pfaller

This is a pre-order - the pamphlet will be sent in Autumn 2025.

How can we understand the fact that, within such a short time, the discourse of sexual liberation turned into that of sexual harassment, or or how a party that had its origins in the peace movement in the 1980s (like the German Green Party) perverted itself into a party of moralist warmongers?

To answer these and similar questions, this new pamphlet by the legendary Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller argues that while Adorno and Horkheimer suspected reason to contain a moment of immanent violence, we might be better served to suspect antiauthoritarianism to contain a moment of immanent obstruction against autonomy.

Robert Pfaller is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. Founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicadenti”. 2007 he was awarded “The Missing Link” price for connecting psychoanalysis with other scientific disciplines, by Psychoanalytisches Seminar Zurich - for the German edition of his book "The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners" ("Die Illusionen der anderen. Ueber das Lustprinzip in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).