With a critical eye, Gabriel Rockhill guides you through complex debates in history, politics and aesthetics, giving you an overview of key issues and central figures, including Foucault, Derrida, Castoriadis, Badiou and Rancière. Rockhill also engages in a nuanced exploration of recent work that calls into question the stereotype of ‘prominent figures’ and ‘intellectual movements. Far from hiding behind towering figures of the intellectual world, Rockhill stakes out positions in relationship to them and formulates precise arguments in favour of a new understanding of the historical relationship between art and politics.

These timely interventions challenge us to rethink the role and influence of scholarly discourse and critique. Gabriel Rockhill has developed a highly original, "conjunctural" approach, which consists in reading the works of the French cultural critics and philosophers that are at the core of his expertise, according to a judgment of relevance and urgency that is part of our own historicity as critics and academics. These sharp readings of Rancière, Derrida, Foucault and Badiou are therefore part of a welcome call to arms to revitalize and politicize Anglo-American cultural scholarship. -- Giuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh

Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop at the Université Paris Descartes. He is the author of Radical History and the Politics of Art (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Editions Hermann, 2010). He co-edited and co-authored, with Alfredo Gomez-Muller, Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 2011), which has also been published in French and in Spanish. He co-edited and contributed to Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2009) and Technologies de contrôle dans la mondialisation: Enjeux politiques, éthiques et esthétiques (Editions Kimé, 2009). He also edited and translated, with John V. Garner, Cornelius Castoriadis’s Postscript on Insignificance (Continuum Books, 2011), as well as Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum Books, 2004).