Jenkins, Nicholas

Biography

Before receiving his MAEC in Eastern Classics and Philosophy from St John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Nico Jenkins exhibited widely as an artist while residing in New York City. During that time, though not officially enrolled, Jenkins audited classes at The New School for Social Research, discovering a deep and abiding interest in philosophy, most notably in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through the marvelously convoluted words of Jacques Derrida, the ideas of Martin Heidegger. After receiving his Master’s Degree, Jenkins immediately began his PhD work in continental philosophy, returning first to The New School for Social Research and then to the Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien in Saas-Fee, Switzerland (also known as the European Graduate School) where he is ABD. Jenkins is currently at work on his dissertation, provisionally entitled “The Difficulty of Naming” which is an examination of the problematic role of language and in particular words in the thought of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Jenkins is also co-editor and founder of the magazine continent. Begun as an experiment in academic publications, continent. seeks to map a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art.

Research Interest

As a teacher of philosophy, I seek to offer questions, and never answers, to the questioning of a constantly changing, constantly shifting world. Truths in this world emerge constantly and are just as constantly concealed, dissolved. In my teaching, I attempt to provide a framework of thought from which we can examine and question the world, in order to peer further and deeper into the constructs and conditions which denote and define not only our lives, but life as it dynamically manifests around us.