La cancel culture come subcultura politica

Is the so-called «cancel culture» a form of censorship and an attack on free speech, as is often claimed? In this article I try, first of all, to distinguish it from the broader theme of «memory politics», that is, from conflicts (well documented in history) on the political implications of forms of cultural memory such as monuments, toponymy and so on. Secondly, I want to disentangle «cancel culture» from the opposition between political left and right, to which it is usually reduced; I rather try to read it in a specific ideological context, that of university campuses and other cultural institutions in the United States and in the English-speaking world, where politics takes the prevailing form of clashing between essentialized identities of a «racial» and gender type. Finally, I try to grasp the core of the social processes that cancel culture triggers in a game of accusations, confessions, degradation and purification rituals – particularly evident in the obsession with sexual harassment. Unlike some of their historical precedents, these socio-cultural forms manifest themselves today as a kind of subcultures: by definition they do not involve the entire social body, but only some of its segments, that use cancel culture wars as strategies of social distinction.