GlobalIngoli
Francesco Ingoli (1578-1649) as Political Thinker and Global Theorist

I am a historian of philosophy working at the crossroads of political thought, intellectual history, and cultural studies. What drives my research is a simple yet far-reaching question: how did the thinkers of early modern Europe make sense of a world that was suddenly, dramatically expanding before their eyes – and how did that encounter reshape the very categories through which they understood power, space, and knowledge?

Trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Lyon, I completed my PhD at the IHRIM (ENS-Lyon) with a dissertation on desire, matter, and subjectivity in the philosophy of Giordano Bruno. From there, my path took me across the Atlantic to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I spent three years as researcher, teaching assistant, and member of the editorial board of “MLN – Modern Language Notes”. I then moved to the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where I taught political philosophy and theories of natural law, before joining Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as Assistant Professor in Philosophy.

This itinerary – from the Renaissance cosmos of Bruno to the global ambitions of the Counter-Reformation Church – reflects a consistent fascination with how ideas travel, transform, and produce political effects. My work on Machiavelli has explored the relationship between passions, urban space, and political institutions. My current research on Francesco Ingoli pushes this inquiry further, into the uncharted territory of 17th-century global political thought: how the Catholic Church theorised its own expansion, gathered intelligence about the world’s populations, and forged a new political vocabulary – including the very concept of ‘propaganda’ – that still resonates today.

Alongside my academic work, I am currently completing a training in psychoanalysis (Association des Psychanalystes Européens). This is not a separate pursuit: it deepens and extends the questions at the heart of my philosophical research – the workings of desire, the force of symbolic structures, and the ways in which the imaginary shapes both individual experience and collective life.

My research revolves around four interconnected areas:

1. Early modern political philosophy. I study the political ideas that emerged in 16th–17th-century Europe at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and law – from theories of sovereignty and reason of state to the Church’s doctrine of indirect power ("potestas indirecta").
2. The philosophy of Giordano Bruno. My doctoral work reconstructed Bruno’s philosophy of desire as a theory of knowledge and transformation. I continue to explore his thought as a radical challenge to the intellectual boundaries of his time.
3. Global intellectual history. I am increasingly interested in how extra-European encounters – cultural, religious, political – reshaped the conceptual frameworks of European thinkers, and how figures like Ingoli acted as nodes in a global network of knowledge circulation.
4. Psychoanalysis and the symbolic imagination. I explore the role of myth, symbol, and imagination as constitutive forces in political and cultural life. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as on the work of thinkers such as Furio Jesi, Mircea Eliade, and C.G. Jung, I investigate how archetypal images and mythological narratives operate as deep structures that organise collective experience – a line of inquiry that runs through my work on Bruno’s “ars memoriae”, on the political uses of passions in Machiavelli, and on the very machinery of ‘propaganda’ in the Counter-Reformation.