Gabriel Rockhill

Rockhill has advanced a new model for thinking the historical relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding them as two spheres separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, he demonstrates through a "materialist deconstruction" that they are not fixed entities with a singular relation, but rather socio-historical practices and "concepts in struggle" with shifting borders. In books like Radical History & the Politics of Art (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), he proposes a significant departure from extant philosophical debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics" in the name of a radically historicist analysis of the "social politicity" inherent in the modes of production, circulation and reception of aesthetic practices. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political traditions, his work carefully maps interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in specific fields of struggle.

In his earlier work, Logique de l'histoire: pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Éditions Hermann, 2010), he developed an alternative logic of history and historical change, which emphasizes the geographic and social dimensions of history, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. His most recent book, Contre-histoire du temps présent: interrogations intempestives sur la mondialisation, la technologie, la démocratie (CNRS Éditions, 2017; published in English as Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy, Duke University Press, 2017) expands this work to a critical analysis of the dominant image of the present moment, thereby dismantling what he refers to as the "historical and political imaginary of the contemporary conjuncture."

Gabriel Rockhill graduated from Grinnell College in 1995. 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, as well as a Ph.D. from Emory University.

Gabriel Rockhill (born 1972) is a French-American philosopher, cultural critic, writer and public intellectual. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Founder and Executive Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne/EHESS, and former Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie. He also co-directs the seminar "Socio-philosophie du temps présent. Enjeux épistémologiques, méthodologiques et critiques" at the EHESS in Paris.