I am a philosopher who has published and taught extensively on psychoanalysis, philosophy of religion, French and Italian theory, biopolitics, and Marxism. Questions regarding subjectivation, the origins, transmission, and modification of social structures, as well as the ontological and political nature of the human animal are crucial concerns in all strands of my current and past investigations. My orientation is realist and materialist.

My books include Subjectivity and Otherness (MIT Press, 2007); The Italian Difference (Re.press, 2009) (edited with Alberto Toscano); Lacan and Philosophy (Re.press, 2014); Italian Thought Today (Routledge, 2014); The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016); The Virtual Point of Freedom (Northwestern University Press, 2016); Zhelanie i Naslazdenie (Skifia Print, 2020); Das Trojanische Schloss (NDFJ, 2025); and God Is Undead. Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers (Bloomsbury, 2025) (with Adrian Johnston). I translated books by Agamben and Virno into English and by Žižek into Italian.

I am currently writing a two-volume book on Lacan and Badiou, their "homologous" formalised ontologies and psychoanalysis as a truth-procedure, drawing also from the philosophy of mathematics (specifically, axiomatic set theory), tentatively titled Letter and Event. Lacan, Badiou, and the Future of Psychoanalysis. The long-term general objective of all these projects is formulating what over the years I have been referring to as a para-ontology of in-difference, or meta-critical realism.

Presently, I am Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University (UK), where I am also serving as co-convenor of the Faculty Research Group in Critical Theory and Practice as well as lead point for our global partnership with the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. I was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where I founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. I held visiting professor positions at institutions in the UK, continental Europe, the US, and Asia. I served as director of the GSH - Genoa School of Humanities in Italy. In 2025, I was a Leverhulme International Fellow. I am the editor-in-chief of a book series on Italian radical thought (“Insubordinations”) at the MIT Press.