Etienne Turpin

Etienne is currently teaching in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto and in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Etienne completed his PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in Theory and Policy Studies, specializing in Philosophy and Pedagogy. His doctoral thesis – Aesthetics of Expenditure: Art, Philosophy, and the Infinite Faculty –  examined the way in which the 20th-century French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille developed a notion of expenditure which served as a transformative event in post-Kantian discussions of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. The thesis then unfolded a reading of the artistic practice of the American artist Robert Smithson (by way of his own reading of Bataille) as a material-artistic compliment to Bataille’s theory of general economy.

Etienne's current postdoctoral research is focused on the contemporary shift in geological discourse wherein the consequences of human activity have become so dramatic that geologists have adopted the term the ‘Anthropocene’ to designate the era from the Industrial Revolution to the present. The research engages the social, political, and ecological consequences of this shift and their bearing on our idea of the human. He is presently completing a manuscript, entitled Terrible is the Earth: Philosophy, Art, and the Anthropocene, which argues for a reevaluation of ‘the human’ within political theory and philosophy on the basis of the shifting position in relation to geological time cycles. As Homo sapiens move beyond their biological species-being to a new era of geological reformation, the book reviews the philosophical stakes of 'the human' within the tradition of philosophy and aesthetics from Kant to the present, and analyzes key moments in this history that evince the social consequences of our becoming-geological and the political significance of the shift from anthropocentrism to the Anthropocene age.

Etienne’s additional research interests include contemporary philosophy, philosophy of nature, the history of aesthetics and landscape aesthetics, the history and theory of the city, and postwar French literature. His research and writing also engage issues of urban political ecology, the political-economy of design practices, resource scavenging, and environments of desolation.