Staff profile

I studied Philosophy & Politics and Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick before completing a PhD on contemporary French philosophy at the University of Cambridge (Downing College), in 2007. I then spent two years teaching at Université Paris-Est Créteil (formerly Université Paris-12) and three at the University of Oxford (Wadham and University Colleges), before coming to Durham in 2012. I was appointed to Associate Professor at Durham in 2017, before promotion to full Professor in July 2020.

Postgraduate Supervision

I receive around a dozen requests for supervision per year for PhDs on topics covering all areas at the intersection of continental philosophy, politics, and science and technology studies. Most of my current students work on Stiegler and related figures (Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Malabou, David Graeber, Georges Canguilhem, Peter Sloterdijk and Byung-chul Han), to some degree, but I have previously supervised doctoral students on names from across the range of twentieth-century continental political philosophy, from Weil, Bachelard and Heidegger to Derrida, Deleuze, Jameson and Donna Haraway. 

I am less interested in narrowly philosophical projects than in interdisciplinarity, combining philosophy (continental or analytic), for instance, with STS, biology and neuroscience, psychoanalysis and evolutionary anthropology. I am particularly keen to supervise projects in the field of Digital Studies, which is to say, exploring the interrelationship between technology, biology and cultural production. I would be pleased to look at postdoctoral research applications in these areas, too, and have previously mentored postdocs on projects including the work of Henri Atlan, digital philosophy, and Anthropocenic theory.

Research Interests

I am a (‘continental’) political philosopher by training and continue to work primarily in this field, but with an increasing emphasis on how contemporary politics is shaped by interactions between technology and biology. My first book, Politics of the Gift, looked at anthropology, economics and politics in the work of thinkers including Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, exploring how they took on emerging anthropological ideas about exchange (notably gift-economics) as a way of moving beyond traditional Marxism, but also as a way of reinventing the institution of philosophy, which was threatened with obsolescence by the rise of the social sciences. My more recent work poses the same questions, while moving from the social to the harder sciences: what role in the construction of society, if any, does philosophy still have to play in an era dominated by neuroscience, bioscience and computational capitalism? A major strand of my work has focused on how technological organs ‘exapt’, or reinvent, the products of evolutionary history, transforming our experience of the world, desire and attention. Related to this, I have worked extensively on the relationship between addiction and social organisation, and on the surprising role that philosophical engagements with technology addiction have played in the history of philosophy, including in the work of Plato and Kant. I have argued that both climate change and the current proliferation of ‘fake news’ are inseparable from a global economy organised around the systemic manufacture of consumption addiction – understood in the full clinical sense of the term –, and need to be treated as such. I am now moving from research on ‘hyperdopaminergic diseases’ and their relation to the stressful ecology of contemporary living to broader questions of immunology, including the relationship between the virulence of Covid-19 and a general immunological fragility that can be attributed to the sedentary, inflamed, lifestyles of late capitalism. This work will be written up in my current, endlessly delayed, monograph project, Anthropocene Animals, which explores technology as a mode of selection and its relation to anthropogenic climate change.

My main interlocutor on this research is the philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, with whom I began close collaboration in 2008. I served as a director of Stiegler’s think tank and lobby group, Ars Industrialis, from 2014 until its reinvention, in December 2019, as the Association des Amis de la Génération Thunberg (AAGT), formed in conjunction with the French wings of Youth for Climate and Extinction Rebellion. I was a founder member of AAGT and serve on its board. Following Stiegler’s death in August 2020, I now chair the Collège Scientifique of his Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, housed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I am a lead member of Stiegler’s Digital Studies Network and am, allegedly, still working on another long overdue monograph, Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Technology (for Polity); plus a collection of interviews, which now needs reframing in light of his death.

• Philosophy of Technology
• Philosophy of Addiction
• Philosophy of Biology and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
• Post-Marxist political theory
• 20th- and 21st-century continental philosophy

• Digital Studies - Convenor

• Ars Industrialis Internation
• Ecole de philosophie d'Epineuil-le-Fleuriel
• Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation (IRI, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

• 2016: Radio interviews, RTS: As part of a two-week series on the work of the think tank, Ars Industrialis, I conducted a series of interviews for Radio Télévision Suisse's 'Histoire vivante' programme.
• 0000: Chair, Collège scientifique, Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation: In September 2020, following the death of IRI's founder and director, Prof Bernard Stiegler, I was named inaugural chair of the Collège scientifique set up to oversee the institute's ongoing research.

Available for media contact about:

• Philosophy:
• Political thought & theory:
• People: Evolution and Biology:
• European & other international expertise: Politics and digital culture
• Europe: Language, literature & culture: Politics and digital culture
• Europe: Politics, institutions & law: Politics and digital culture
• Language, Literature & the Arts: Politics and digital culture
• The Media: Politics and digital culture
• Science & Technology: Politics and digital culture
• People: Evolution and Biology: Politics and digital culture
• Science: Education, industry & the community: Politics and digital culture

Authored book

• Moore, Gerald (Forthcoming). Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Industrial Technology. Polity.
• Crowley, Martin, James, Ian, Moore, Gerald & Stiegler, Bernard (2020). Thinking with Stiegler: Organology, Proletarianization, and Technical Life. Polity.
• Moore, Gerald (2011). Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter in book

• Moore, Gerald (2021). Post-scriptum sur une société malade. In Prendre soin de l’informatique et des générations. Alombert, Anne, Chaix, Victor, Montévil, Maël & Puig, Vincent Éditions FYP. 207-220.
• Stiegler, Bernard & Moore, Gerald (2020). Detox Politics: Thinking-Salving the Retreat of the Public. In Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory. Hesselberth, Pepita & De Bloois, Joost Rowman & Littlefield. 212.
• Moore, Gerald (2020). De la neurodiversité à la noodiversité Construire des niches numériques dans la ville stupéfiée. In Le nouveau génie urbain. Stiegler, Bernard & Sassen, Saskia Éditions FYP. 119-140.
• Moore, Gerald, Mylonas, Nikolaos A., Bossière, Marie-Claude, Alombert, Anne & Pavanini, Marco (2020). La Désintoxication planétaire et la neurobiologie de l’effondrement écologique. In Bifurquer: Il n'y a pas d'alternative. Stiegler, Bernard & Le Collectif Internation Les Liens Qui Libèrent.
• Moore, Gerald (2019). Philosophy and Other Addictions: on use and abuse in the history of life. In Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells. Davis, Oliver & Davis, Colin Cambridge: Legenda.
• Moore, Gerald (2018). 'Une ‘mémoire-monde’ et les communs contributifs Virtual Open World'. In La vérité du numérique: Recherche et enseignement supérieur à l’ère des technologies numériques. Stiegler, Bernard Limoges: Editions FYP. 137-152.
• Moore, Gerald (2017). Dopamining and Disadjustment: Addiction and Digital Capitalism. In Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence. Bartlett, Vanessa & Bowden-Jones, Henrietta Liverpool University Press. 68-75.
• Moore, Gerald (2013). "Adapt and Smile or Die!" Stiegler among the Darwinists. In Stiegler & Technics. Moore, Gerald & Howells, Christina Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Moore, Gerald (2011). Psychoanalysis since 1966. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory: Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present. Eaglestone, Robert Blackwell. 2: 790-797.
• Moore, Gerald (2008). (Dys)Clockwork Politics: Rhythm and the Production of Time. In Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Film and Culture. Lindley, Elizabeth & McMahon, Laura Berne: Peter Lang. 133-146.

Edited book

• Howells, Christina & Moore, Gerald (2013). Stiegler and Technics. Critical Connections. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Journal Article

• Moore, Gerald (2020). Bernard Stiegler, 1958-2020. Radical Philosophy 2(08): 108-112.
• Moore, Gerald (2019). Automations, Technological and Nervous: Addiction Epidemics from Athens to Fake News. New Formations 98: 119-138.
• Moore, Gerald (2018). 'The Pharmacology of Addiction'. Parrhesia 29: 190-211.
• Moore, Gerald (2017). Phenomenotechnics and Disavowal: Climate Change and the Politics of Deferred Experience. Azimuth 9: 113-125.
• Moore, Gerald (2017). 'On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial Selection; or, the Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle for Existence'. Boundary 2 44(1): 191-212.
• Moore, Gerald (2016). 'Prolégomènes à un manifeste des études digitales'. Études Digitales 1(2).
• Moore, Gerald (2013). Embers of the Sublime: Sacrifice and the Sensation of Existence. The Senses and Society 8(1): 37-49.
• Moore, Gerald (2012). Crises of Derrida: Theodicy, Sacrifice and (Post-)deconstruction. Derrida Today 5(2): 264-282.
• Moore, Gerald (2011). Gay Science and (No) Laughing Matter: The Eternal Returns of Michel Houellebecq. French Studies 65(1): 45-60.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Moore, Gerald (2017). Le Pharmakon, le dopaminage et la société addictogène. Dépendances (59).

Other (Print)

• Moore, Gerald (2017). ‘… pro foro mori’, in Life Day: Fortunes of War.

Translated Book

• Moore, Gerald, Brenner, Neil & Elden, Stuart (trans.) (2008). Lefebvre, Henri, Henri Lefebvre: State, Space, World . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press