I am a political science professor holding the chair titled “Political Thought, Rhetoric, and Culture”. I served as the Head of the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy from 2014 to 2018, as the Chair of the University Collegium from 2018 to 2020, and on the Faculty Council for the Faculty of Social Sciences at Jyväskylä from 2014 to 2017. I have been a visiting scholar at several universities, including Verona, Uppsala, Newcastle (AUS), and Genova. Additionally, I have served as the Principal Investigator on various externally funded projects, such as Crises Redefined (2018-2021) (Academy of Finland Profiling Area Grant), Biopolitics in Classical Greece (2014-2015) (Wihuri Foundation), The Intellectual Heritage of Radical Cultural Conservatism (2013-2017) (Academy of Finland Project Grant), Rethinking Cultural Diversity in Europe: Beyond Universalism and Particularism (2010-2012) (University of Helsinki Project Grant), and Political Genealogy of Conscience (2005-2010) (Academy of Finland Research Fellow Grant). Before my professorship in Jyväskylä, I was a post-doctoral scholar and a senior researcher at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki.
As a scholar, I am a political theorist specializing in the history of political thought from a Continental perspective. I have published seven books, four in Finnish and three in English. The most recent English book examines biopolitical aspects of Plato’s and Aristotle’s political philosophy (On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower, Routledge, 2016), arguing that the biopolitical way of thinking can be traced back to Antiquity and that modern biopolitics originates from the Renaissance reception of these philosophers’ ideas, while Christianity introduced an anti-biopolitical break in this continuum. Prior to that, I published an in-depth history of the concept and idea of conscience (The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy of Western Ethical Experience, Bloomsbury, 2013), tracing its development from Socrates through the Church Fathers, Scholastics, Reformation theologians, early modern thinkers, Enlightenment, and Romantic philosophers to Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, and Derrida. I have also written a book on Carl Schmitt’s political thought (A Philosophy of Concrete Life: Carl Schmitt and the Political Thought of Late Modernity, Peter Lang 2006), which, besides offering a comprehensive but critical overview of Schmitt’s ideas and theories, compares his philosophy of the “extreme” to late modern philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In addition to books, I have published 53 peer-reviewed articles on various topics and authors, including biopolitics, political theology, political theory, Plato, Apostle Paul, Hobbes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, and Agamben. I am currently working on a manuscript titled “Democracy as Anarchy: Plato on a Life without Principles,” aiming to develop a theory of democracy, a democratic way of life, and the democratic personality based on Plato’s metaphysics and reflections on democracy.
