On Cancel Culture. From Judging to Lynching: Repressions and Discriminations in the Name of Morality
When the Italian edition of Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia was published by Einaudi in 1954, it was noted (with a certain surprise on the part of some) that of the one hundred and fifty-three passages that made up the original edition, only one hundred and fifteen appeared. For a complete translation of the thirty-eight missing passages, we had to wait more than twenty years. The Minima imMoralia. Aforismi “tralasciati” nell’edizione italiana was published by a small publishing house, so to speak “alternative”, L’Erba Voglio, founded among others by Elvio Fachinelli, one of the most original psychoanalysts of the second generation of the Freudian school. A few years later, however, in 1979, Einaudi decided to provide the full edition of the text. For what reason in the first edition of 1954 had been “left out” those thirty-eight pieces? Above all, did the adjective in question render the idea correctly or would it not have been more appropriate to use other expressions such as: expunged, removed, crossed out, discarded, or perhaps ousted, abolished, deleted, suppressed? Or why not even censored? In all cases, it is evident, cancelled.
For these reasons it was essential, in an attempt to understand the many shadows that the phenomenon of the so-called Cancel Culture shows to drag along, to go back to the Minima Moralia. Perhaps we could also take into account the fact that in all this psychoanalysis itself has perhaps played some role. Is it really completely meaningless, for example, that censorship has been identified since the first Freudian topical the elective “mechanism” activator of removal and therefore constitutive of the unconscious? It would seem difficult to deny it. Therefore, we could conclude that Cancel Culture would be nothing but the expression of some “psychic obscenity” and not simply the last drift of a tragicomic (but still catastrophic) kitsch of nefarious (and uncultivated) “Cultural Industry”.