I was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva and studied philosophy at the University of Turin and at the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome, where I obtained my PhD in 2006. The following year I was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Potsdam for two years. After a visiting scholarship in 2010 at Johns Hopkins University, I was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. Since 2015 I am ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University, where I currently teach contemporary and political philosophy and supervise PhD students. I am also the founding director of the "UPF Center for Vattimo’s Archives and Philosophy." My books have been all been published by Columbia, McGill-Queen's, and Northwestern University Press and my op-ed in The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. I have been invited as visiting professor by the University of Turin and Renmin University.

My books, articles, and research focus on the meaning of art, politics, and freedom in the twenty-first century where, as I claim, "the greatest emergency has become the absence of emergency." The goal of philosophy is to thrust us into these absent emergencies (such as climate change or economic inequality) in order to disrupt the ongoing “return to order” that surveillance capitalism and right-wing populism are imposing upon us. These problems are discussed in my most recent book—Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025) - translated into Spanish and Italian) —and in many articles. I also co-edit (with Adrian Parr) a book series for McGill-Queen’s University Press where six volumes have been released so far.