CHOICE June 2015 vol. 52 no. 10
Rockhill, Gabriel. Radical history & the politics of art. Columbia, 2014. 274p

This volume by Rockhill (Villanova Univ.) investigates the relationship between art and politics by beginning with the philosophy of history. The basic claim that ties this engaging essay collection together is that past interpreters of the relationship between art and politics err in seeing the relationship in terms of two independent domains that exist prior to the relationship between them. Making sense of this requires a foray into the philosophy of history, which is where Rockhill’s book begins. Rather than starting with theoretical concepts, one must begin with concrete practices to make sense of contemporary art. Drawing on the work of recent French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and, in particular, Jacques Rancière, Rockhill argues for a nominalist, antiessentialist philosophy of history in which identities are constituted out of individual relation; this is the focus of the book’s first section. The second section applies the antiessentialist conception of history to problems of the avant-garde. The book turns explicitly to Rancière in the third and fourth sections to elucidate the politics of aesthetics. This volume should appeal to scholars working in contemporary art theory and to those interested in contemporary French thought. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.

–C. R. McCall, Elmira College
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