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, and 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); and Zhelanie i Naslazdenie (Skifia Print, 2020). I translated books by Agamben and Virno into English and by Žižek into Italian.

My new book (co-authored with Adrian Johnston), God Is Undead. Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers, which aims at further developing some of the main themes I introduced in The Not-Two, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in February 2025. I am currently writing a monograph on Lacan and Badiou, their "homologous" formalised ontologies and psychoanalysis as a truth-procedure, tentatively titled Letter and Event. Lacan, Badiou, and the Future of Psychoanalysis. The long-term general objective of 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. I teach at the European Graduate School (EGS). 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 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. I am the editor of a book series on Italian radical thought (“Insubordinations”) at the MIT Press.