I’m honored by this Farsi translation of my latest article in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “The Philosophical Salon,” entitled “The Failure of the French Intelligentsia? Intellectuals and Uprisings in the Case of the Yellow Vests.” A special thanks to my comrades in the Radical Education Department, as well as to Rahman Bouzari and Saleh Najafi!
I was pleased to be able to contribute to Ty Joplin’s excellent article on the Yellow Vests, which elucidates how the media spectacle around “violence” has obscured class struggle.
Excerpt: “Instead of taking activists seriously and discussing their demands for greater equality, thereby informing the public about what is actually at stake, the media construct an enormous spectacle out of ‘violence’ in order to present the movement as savage, irrational, and intent on destroying the very foundations of society,” Gabriel Rockhill, an Associate Professor of philosophy at Villanova University who also runs the Critical Theory Workshop in Paris, told Al Bawaba.
“Moreover, the production of this spectacle of violence also serves as cover for the greatest purveyor of violence in France today: the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus.”
Hier ist eine deutsche Übersetzung meines Artikels auf die #GiletsJaunes. Vielen Dank Enough Is Enough! Reblogged von The Philosophical Salon und RED.
My latest article in the LA Review of Books is available here. It critically examines the relationship between the professional intelligentsia and the Yellow Vests: “Although France has the reputation of having a leftwing intelligentsia, some of the most visible theorists on the Left—including the self-proclaimed torchbearers of the ‘spirit of ’68’—have positioned themselves firmly against the movement or admonished it from the sidelines. This disconnect between important segments of the professional intelligentsia and one of the most powerful social movements of recent years raises very serious questions regarding the politics of intellectual life and, more generally, the relationship between the literati and uprisings. By exploring the intelligentsia’s response—both in France and beyond—to the Yellow Vests movement, this article seeks to elucidate the broader problematic of the role of intellectuals in the maintenance or transformation of the current socio-economic order […read more].”
A special thanks to all of my RED comrades for their excellent feedback and suggestions on this article, which we’ve also run here on RED’s website.
The Critical Theory Workshop will by launching its symposia series on April 26th, 2019, and I will be presenting my research on the consequences of the CIA’s cultural Cold War on the international theory industry. Click here for additional details.
I am very pleased to have the opportunity to present with Jennifer Ponce de León at the International Art and Theory Program in New York tomorrow, April 18th, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. We will be discussing third cinema and the limits of decolonial theory in the framework of our ongoing research on aesthetics and revolutionary politics.
I am honored to have the opportunity to present my research on the remake, entitled “Temporal Vertigo: The Art of the Remake from Hitchcock to Gilliam via Marker,” at the University of Houston on April 4th, 2019.
I am excited to have a public conversation with Boots Riley at Villanova!
My latest article, entitled “Spectacular Violence as a Weapon of War against the Yellow Vests,” was just published here in CounterPunch.
Excerpt: “Violence is a spectacular weapon deployed by the ruling class to discredit movements from below and justify their repression. It is spectacular in the sense of being a great and powerful political tool for governing the masses, and keeping them in their place. In order to do this, however, the weapon of violence is spectacular in a second sense: it creates a carefully orchestrated mise en scène that seeks to render ruling class violence invisible, while simultaneously transforming acts of resistance into prodigious spectacles of criminal violence.”
I will be giving the seminar below on March 23rd from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Incite Seminars in downtown Philadelphia, in collaboration with the Critical Theory Workshop.
AESTHETICS: TOWARD A RADICAL HISTORY
This seminar will explore some of the most vexing questions in the history of aesthetics: What is art? How does it relate to the ‘real’ world of politics and society? How has it developed and changed over time? It will examine some of the responses given to these questions by major thinkers like Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag and Jacques Rancière. This will lead to a broader interrogation into the very presuppositions that structure these types of questions, as well as their answers, thereby opening space for a tectonic shift in our understanding of aesthetics, its social roles, and its history.
In its broadest sense, this shift will lead from an understanding of aesthetics as having a more or less fixed nature to one in which it is radically historicized by being recognized as a dynamic social product of certain cultures. Examining the networks of production, circulation and reception operative in what is called art in the modern ‘Western’ world, with an eye to its variations across time, space and social strata, this course inspects how the European world has developed—and then attempted to universalize—a very unique concept and practice of aesthetics, which is bound up in various ways with colonial expansion and the capitalist exhibition of symbolic goods.
Reading: Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History & the Politics of Art
Recommended Film: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Statues also Die
GABRIEL ROCKHILL 