Simon May (1)

Simon May has published a book of aphorisms, which I will not read, because aphorisms have to be perfect to be anything other than tedious. But that fact explains a lot about this book. May clearly belongs to the camp that thinks philosophy should be thought-provoking, rather than clear or coherent. There's nothing wrong with that, but this book is an example of what happens when the thoughts provoked are dull, or they remain unprovoked. Others have pointed out the silliness of his chapters on the Kim family and Donald Trump. I have a more academic gripe.

May offers a quick literature survey of academic writing on cute. This is nice, because most of that writing is so opaque that only people who are paid to read it will read it, and much of it is a simplistic regurgitation of fashionable theory speak; Sianne Ngain is an exception to this latter point.

May also pitches his book at non-academic readers... but makes a huge deal about how he is subverting academic norms by arguing that cute isn't just another commodification of desire or desublimation of fascist bullying. He is, in short, overturning the *entire modern intellectual edifice* by claiming that some parts of human life aren't just about power relations. It seems to have escaped his notice that most people who write about power relations also think precisely that, and are writing to point out that we should try to overcome power relations, instead of just replicating them.

So, if cute isn't just commodification or power relations, and if May is too respectable to just say 'cute will save the world!!!!!', why has cute become so popular? Because it is a revolt of the commoners against the power-theory wielding elite. And because it releases our 'caring' drives and makes us like other people. And because it mirrors the cult of the child (true). And because it is a symptom of the modern lust for independence and uncertainty (May clearly shares that lust, and is honest enough to admit it). And--you will think this is parody, but it is not--because Japan, Europe, and the United States reacted to world war II by searching for perpetual peace and an end to violence, and cute is an expression of that. It's a bit like Stephen Pinker on acid: the same neglect of historical facts, the same idealization of the liberal first world. And, like Stephen Pinker, I finished this book with much more understanding of why people vote for Donald Trump. It's because of the immense ignorance of intelligent people like Simon May.

Also, if I have to read another sentence that piles up near-synonyms in the belief that those piles clarify a concept, I will cry and scream. 'This is the world that is overlooked by conventional views of Cute as merely innocent, playful, guileless, helpless... [it] involves a dialogue between the familiar and unfamiliar, the unthreatening and the menacing, the present and the withdrawn, the visible and the invisible' (25). Kill me now.… (mehr)

very good, great ending and summary after much thoughtful discussion and laying out of different theories of what love is. only part that lets him down is that some of his discussion of the Christian view of love is made to fit either stereotypes he is coming against (which stereotypes exist, it is agreed, but they are not necessarily fully Biblical and Christian) or to then serve his own thesis of conditionality. But even then he never ventures toward heresy when discussing Christian views to serve his purpose in the book.… (mehr)

This was an excellent book to read towards the end of a trip to Japan. Simon May spent a year teaching Philosophy at the elite Tokyo University, and the book, whose imprint page insists is fiction, implicitly claims on every other page to be a truthful account of his experience as a gaijin. There are echoes of other sex-preoccupied Japan-visitor book, most strikingly in the description of a vaginal gymnastics display, a form of entertainment that has apparently persisted to the present day, for those who know the right people. His observations about Japanese society mercifully lack essentialising chat about 'the Japanese', and he creates (presumably) composite characters to embody them. He has a bit of fun with unintentional double entendre, as in a fax from a restaurant where he has booked a table, 'We look forward to seeing you come,' a level of humour to which man wouldn't stoop. Of course, his experience of Japan was very different from my three and a half weeks there as a tourist, back in my hotel room by 8.30 most nights. But I saw enough spectacular feats of sleeping, both sitting and standing, on the subway, to recognise the truth in May's surreal anecdotes on the subject; and spent enough time in Hiroshima to disagree with his dismissal of it as ugly and uninteresting, and to know that he is wrong when he says there is no mention of the Rape of Nanking in the Peace Museum there -- though it is fleeting indeed, and I saw nothing to make me quarrel with his sense that the Japanese generally have not done any of the public soul-searching about their Fascist war crimes that the Germans have done about the same period.… (mehr)