Zenon MacKinnon

In the past I’ve been a carpenter, a cantor, a political consultant, and a Franco-Ontarian community organizer. These days I’m a playwright and artistic director of Plato for the People, a scholar of chant and sacred music, and an organizer of the SF-based Avalon Institute for the humanities.

My intellectual life runs along two axes. The first concerns the status of the human: I work with Generative Anthropology as an account of human origins and distinctiveness, in ongoing friction with non-anthropocentric theories — Accelerationism, Manuel DeLanda’s new materialism, Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory — that tell a story where man is incidental to history and may soon become obsolete. The second axis takes the human as given and asks how to actually be one: Eastern Patristics, ritual studies, and Catholic personalism as answers to the question of formation, role-adherence, and what modernity keeps dismantling.

I write and think in French and English. You can read my Substack, Forme résiduelle, or explore Deltoi, a collaborative translation project I work on with friends.