On Cancel Culture. From Judging to Lynching: Repressions and Discriminations in the Name of Morality
The phenomenon of cancel culture has been rightly defined as a process against the past that, exploded in recent years on American university campuses, puts not only classical texts, but also symbols, works of art, and monuments of Western civilization in the dock. This phenomenon, beyond appearances, is diametrically opposed to the “postcolonial criticism” that marked the first phase of globalization. That criticism, while contesting the European idea of “universal history”, did not prevent its main exponent Edward W. Said from confronting authors such as Giambattista Vico and Lukács, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, Melville and Conrad, the genius of Bach and the eccentricity of Schumann, the talent of Rosen and the cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo. None of this in the new Inquisitors of cancel culture. No more confrontation. No more search for in-between identities, located along borderlines or in “interstitial passages” that break the rigid forms of identification. But a self-destructive drift of the West that leads to the dictatorship of a new conformism. Where cancellation produces an effect of concealment of the terrible but fertile conflictual richness of history: of the atrocious and creative, violent and liberating density of humanity’s past.