Patton has published widely on aspects of 20th-century French philosophy, including focus on the works of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault.
Patton's work is preoccupied by the twin tasks of, on one hand, critically analyzing the modern European philosophical tradition and situating it within its broader social and political milieu, and, on the other, drawing out the implications of that philosophical tradition for our present social, political and legal circumstances.
Patton is interested in the enduring problem of indigenous reconciliation, which he attributes to the failure of the Anglo-Australian legal system to "translate" indigenous spiritual and economic conceptions and relationship to the land into "a form of property right recognisable by the common law"[1] According to Patton, colonialism, as "a stark expression of the external power of sovereign European states", was made possible by “[t]he absence, in the new land, of equivalent forms of state” and the perceptions of backwardness of the indigenous populations.
"[2] Between 2000 and 2006, Patton appeared in a number of ABC radio broadcasts, including 'The Descent of Man,'[1] on ABC Radio National's Science Show in 2000, 'Deleuze and Democracy' in 2005,[3] and 'Where philosophy gets done' in 2006,[4] both on the show 'The Philosopher's Zone'.
In 1994 and 1997 Patton was a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, at Australian National University.