Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill is a French-American philosopher and cultural critic. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Theorie Critique, and Directeur de programme at the College International de Philosophie. Rockhill is best known in the English-speaking world for his work on art and politics, including Radical History & the Politics of Art as well as his two co-edited collections Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2009) and Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 2011). In addition to numerous articles, he also edited and translated Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum Books, 2004) and Cornelius Castoriadis’s Postscript on Insignificance (Continuum Books, 2011). However, one of his major works to date is a tome in French that provides a detailed account—via case studies on Plato, Descartes and contemporary thinkers ranging from Foucault and Derrida to Levinas and Lyotard—of the historical and hermeneutic "shift" in philosophic practice and its consequences for contemporary theory: Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Editions Hermann, 2010).

Rockhill has broad research interests spanning contemporary philosophy and critical theory, and has published on a wide range of topics in French and English. He has also collaborated with art collectives and publications, as well as with various art galleries and activist movements.