Lecture on Images at UPenn 9/30
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Videos from CTW/ATC 2016 at the Sorbonne
All of the videos from the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique 2016 at the Sorbonne are now available here. Highlights include discussions with Amy Allen and Patricia Gherovici on psychoanalysis and social criticism, Domenico Losurdo on the counter-history of liberalism, and Souleymane Diagne and Amy Allen on global critical theory and decolonial thought. I also had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with Patrice Maniglier and Jean-Michel Rabaté on the future of Francophone theory, and a presentation with Pierre-Antoine Chardel of our book project Pour une socio-philosophie du monde actuel. Thank you to all of the guests and participants.
Paper Presentation at APSA
I will be presenting a paper entitled “Toward a Counter-History of Democracy” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia. My presentation will be part of the “Democracy Now” panel, which will take place on Friday, Sept. 2 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. in PCC, 108-A. Details and the full schedule are available here.
Abstract
This paper, which is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy, proposes a critical investigation into the massive valorization of democracy in the contemporary political imaginary. It focuses on the ways in which the categorical and near absolute elevation of the term risks prohibiting any deep interrogation into the precise status of actually existing democracy. Continue reading
Op-Ed on Death in New York Times
I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Simon Critchley and Peter Catapano in making the following contribution to The Stone: “Why We Never Die.”
Excerpt: “Our existence has numerous dimensions, and they each live according to different times. The biological stratum, which I naïvely took to mean life in general, is in certain ways a long process of demise — we are all dying all the time, just at different rhythms. Far from being an ultimate horizon beyond the bend, death is a constitutive feature of the unfolding of biological life […read more].”
Op-Ed on ProducTrump in Huff Post
My op-ed, “Corporate Idiocracy and the Manufacturing of ProducTrump,” was just picked up by the Huffington Post. Click here to read it in full. A slightly different version was originally published here in CounterPunch.
Excerpt: “We must not forget that it is the system, not the person, that is the ultimate problem. In fact, there is not really a person here. There is productRump, the tail end of the corporate glitz machine, the rump of a debunk system of hype and distraction in the name of profit and power. Although this butt looms particularly large in its vulgar posturing and machismo, we must not let the backend mask what is behind it. It is only the protruding derrière of an enormous network of media-cracy—i.e. mediocrity—that has produced it [read more]”.
Book Published: Interventions in Contemporary Thought
Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics was just published by Edinburgh University Press (Oxford UP is the distributor).
“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
Table of Contents
Article: “What Is to Be Done, with Theory?”
My most recent opinion piece–related to the publication of Interventions in Contemporary Thought–was just published here.
Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique 2016
The 2016 Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique—an intensive, dual-language research program that I run at the Sorbonne—will begin in exactly one week. The program flyer with the primary events is available here. For more information about the CTW/ATC, which provides an international platform for interdisciplinary, comparative and engaged work in critical social theory, see the follow resources:
The official webpage is available here
You can follow the CTW/ATC on Facebook here
You can participate in the Facebook Group here
You can follow the CTW/ATC on Twitter here
Book Accepted by Duke University Press
Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy has definitively been accepted for publication by Duke University Press and is currently scheduled to appear in the spring of 2017. The French edition of the same book will be published in the fall of 2016 by Éditions CNRS. A brief overview and the TOC are available below.
Overview
We regularly hear that we are living in a global era in which a technological and economic network is increasingly linking together the four corners of the globe, and democracy has imposed itself as the only legitimate form of government. Some have even come to proclaim the end of history, thereby endeavoring to surreptitiously recuperate, by perverting its fundamental meaning, a certain Marxian discourse. And yet, this image of a global age, as advanced as it is civilized, is far from going without saying or being innocuous, and numerous voices have already risen up to contest it. Rooted in a very specific political force field, it often serves as a more or less clandestine vehicle for pernicious social and economic projects.
This is why it is necessary to open an interrogation into this vision of the present moment and, more profoundly, into the historical imaginary on which it depends. The goal of such an endeavor is not to propose an alternative description of our epoch based on the same basic phenomena. For the counter-history undertaken in this book aims precisely at reconfiguring the possibilities of history by proposing a completely different approach to the problem of the contemporary. New perspectives on ourselves thereby emerge, as well as on the world that we are in the process of constructing, and especially on the possibility of elucidating the diverse dimensions of the present conjuncture and taking charge of the meanings and directions of history [des sens de l’histoire].
Table of Contents
Preface Toward a Counter-History of the Present
Chapter 1 A Specter Is Haunting Globalization
Chapter 2 Are We Really Living in a Technological Era?
Chapter 3 What Is the Use of Democracy? Urgency of an Inappropriate Question
Afterword Taking Charge of the Meanings and Directions of History
Russian Translation of Op-Ed on Nuit Debout
A Russian translation of my op-ed in Counterpunch “Revolution Never Sleeps: Nuit Debout in France and Beyond,” was published here.
Движението Nuit debout – “нощем накрак” или “изправи се нощем!” – е убедително напомняне за съществуването на една неуморна глобална борба срещу неолибералното верую и всичките му унищожителни последствия. […read more]
GABRIEL ROCKHILL 