Category: Michael Weinstein

My mentor, close friend, and former PhD and dissertation advisor, Michael A. Weinstein, passed away yesterday. I know that myself and the many other people whose lives he changed will be tottering somewhere between a numb shock and open grief. How could he die? He was one of the most alive people I’ve ever met, exuding enthusiasm for everything and devouring what the world had to offer, even if that world was both “a pleasure palace and a torture chamber”. He was a powerful teacher, prolific scholar, photography critic, and frontman for a punk band into his 60s. He overflowed with compassion and love for his students and friends. He possessed an intellectual nimbleness, acuity, and profoundly deep storehouse of both knowledge and wisdom (his “underground workshop”) that I sincerely doubt I will ever see again. Accompanying these virtues, he possessed a magnetism and pedagogical skill in the classroom that could draw students in, undo their worlds, and then give them another that was clearly alien, and yet somehow familiar and truer. While death was always near to the surface of his philosophical projects, it never really seemed like it could touch him.