Simon May (1)
Autor de Love: A History
Para otros autores llamados Simon May, ver la página de desambiguación.
Sobre El Autor
Simon May is Departmental Fellow in Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London.
Obras de Simon May
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 8
- Miembros
- 185
- Popularidad
- #117,260
- Valoración
- 3.4
- Reseñas
- 4
- ISBNs
- 44
- Idiomas
- 3
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.… (más)