Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill (born 1972) is a French-American philosopher, writer, cultural critic and activist. He is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique], and former Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie.

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

 * Los Angeles Review of Books February 28, 2017


 * According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.


 * The precarization of academic labor contributes to the demolition of radical leftism.