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The risks of cancel culture

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Other voices, for example that of the journalist Jennifer Guerra, disagree. The new attention paid to minority rights, according to this other perspective, should not be ascribed to one politically correctness rampant and corrosive; rather, it would be the result of a broadening of the horizons of the political sphere. An expansion that, in the academic field, has been achieved thanks to post-colonial studies: not recognizing it would be like, for example, reducing the articulated sensitivity of gender studies to the instrumental simplification of the so-called (phantom) “gender ideology”.

It seems to us that the question is too complex to adopt a univocal position: much of the mental suffering of minorities derives precisely from being excluded from political dialogue, not recognized as valid interlocutors and active participants in civil life; protecting their rights is sacrosanct (see also the item Zan ddl). At the same time, some censorship behaviors have a fanatical flavor, they renounce the historical perspective and fuel polarizations that penalize dialogue.

More than ten years ago the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (Internazionale recently re-proposed this contribution) had raised an alarm that in our opinion can work bipartisan (that is, both for the erasers and erasers of unseemly misogynistic classical works, and for the horrendous insulters of women or minorities). In a world where social well-being depended more and more on the dissemination of knowledge, Nussbaum wrote, the humanities and Socratic teaching, based on open dialogue and autonomous thinking, were gradually being supplanted by a hyper-specialized educational model (more and more lacking in general culture): «To understand the complexity of the world well, one cannot use logic and factual knowledge alone. People need a third element, closely related to the first two, which we can call narrative imagination. It is the ability to think of oneself in someone else’s shoes, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s history, to understand their emotions, desires and desires.».

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In this column we have often stated that one of the most important elements of clinical dialogue is precisely the creation of a dimension of “we”, the “analytic third”, which arises from the encounter of two subjectivities, the opening of a field in which the conflicts and the most “uncomfortable” parts of personalities are known, deepened, elaborated and, when needed, countered.

From the individual to the collective, even in public dialogue, the removal of confrontation can be very harmful. Having said that, it is clear that one cannot say everything or converse with anyone. Especially with someone whose words increase the suffering of already traumatized minorities or categories. On this, in our opinion, one can be Kantian and argue, as a categorical imperative, the legitimacy of the battles against incitement to racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia. But this does not mean that art must renounce experimentation, provocation, risk. Nor does it mean that the past, with its contradictions and horrors, should be bleached or removed and not studied. Against the fake news, we increasingly need true testimonies and as many voices as possible. Including creative, experimental or contextualizing narrative interpretations, which allow us to read reality from multiple points of view. It is one thing to close the racist hater blog, be it a politician or an ordinary citizen, it is quite another not to be able to read Celine, Nabokov or Allen.

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