Gabriel Rockhill


Gabriel Rockhill is an American philosopher, writer, and cultural critic. He is Professor of Philosophy & Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Director of Cultural Studies, and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop at Villanova University, as well as former program director at the Collège International de Philosophie.
Best known for his work in the fields of history, aesthetics, and politics, he is also a regular contributor to public intellectual debate, and his writings have circulated in venues such as CounterPunch, Black Agenda Report, The New York Times'', Libération, and the Los Angeles Review of Books''.

Early life and education

As an undergraduate Rockhill attended Grinnell College in Iowa, graduating in 1995. He then moved to Paris to study philosophy. He earned a master's degree under the direction of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and a Ph.D. under the direction of Alain Badiou from Paris 8 University, where Étienne Balibar led the committee for his dissertation evaluation. Rockhill also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University.

Work

Academic philosophy

Rather than understanding politics and art as two separate spheres, he demonstrates through historical materialist analysis that they are not fixed categories with a singular relation, but rather social practices and "concepts in struggle." In books like Radical History & the Politics of Art and Interventions in Contemporary Thought, he proposes a departure from extant philosophical debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics" in the name of a radically historicist analysis of the political dimensions inherent in the modes of production, circulation, and reception of aesthetic practices. Engaging with an array of intellectual, artistic, and political traditions, his work maps interactions between aspects of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in fields of struggle.
In his earlier work, Logique de l'histoire, he developed an alternative logic of history that emphasizes the geographic and social dimensions of history, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Another book, Contre-histoire du temps présent, expands this work to a critical analysis of the dominant image of the present moment, dismantling what he refers to as the "historical and political imaginary of the contemporary conjuncture."

Critical Theory Workshop

Since 2008, Rockhill has directed the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique in Paris. Originally conceived as a study abroad program for Villanova University, it currently operates as an independent nonprofit that hosts an annual Summer School at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.

Critical theory and the Cold War

In addition to his scholarly publications, Rockhill has written a number of essays of political critiques that tie the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and other Western capitalist nation-states' security apparatuses to the anti-communist politics of Western intellectual thought as seen in the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, Slavoj Žižek, and others. These online articles for left literary publications have been subject to debate and have been translated into multiple languages.

Selected bibliography

Books

Sole-authored books

Journal articles

  • Public essays

  • "," CounterPunch, January 3, 2023.
  • ","The Philosophical Salon, June 27, 2022,
  • "," The Philosophical Salon, February 1, 2021.
  • ","The Philosophical Salon, October 12, 2020.
  • , Truthout, August 23, 2017.
  • "," The Philosophical Salon, February 28, 2017.
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