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I think the best way of understanding "cancel culture" is by invoking the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. Being "against" cancel culture immediately cancels itself, because it is a call to cancel cancel culture. In order to stake...
…this position, it has to contradict itself and in fact become a form of what it denounces. It is impossible for any denunciation of cancel culture to escape this mirroring relation with its supposed other because it cannot possibly raise itself to a statement of law…
… Any law that we shouldn’t cancel, that everyone should be able to speak freely, would have to support precisely the forms of canceling that anti-cancel culture claims to abhor...
...While people often look for other actions taken by anti-CC people to accuse them of self-contradiction (times when they supported canceling or silencing someone), really one only needs to quote any anti-CC statement itself….
…to break this mirroring symmetry and posit a law that isn’t self-defeating one must invoke some sort of position (which people making these statements always implicitly have, often a sinister one). We should have our arguments over those values, instead of the red herring of CC
