Cancel Culture (1) : Bataille and Blanchot

The quarrel between cancel culture in universities and online and the thought of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille is not a quarrel about manners. It turns on incompatible accounts of community, language, and value. Cancel culture treats social life as a moral economy of debts, claims, and guarantees. It seeks clarity through naming, confession, and exclusion. It understands justice as the distribution of recognition and penalty within a restricted ledger. Blanchot and Bataille begin from a different terrain. They take community to be an exposure that no one can own. They treat language as something that fails at the point where it most matters, yet must continue. They take value to be more than utility, since every collective life produces an excess that cannot be contained by accountancy. 

Set these views side by side and the clash is stark. The first asks for a settled order that removes ambiguity through ritualised verdicts. The second dwells where ambiguity is constitutive and where any attempt to purify the bond results in cruelty.

Cancel culture imagines a we that is secured by shared avowals, correct alignments, and the removal of those who refuse or fail the rites. The community is a work to be finished and guarded. It is verified through declarations and through the visible discharge of discipline. Blanchot writes of a community that appears precisely where avowal fails. It is unavowable not because it hides a crime, but because the relation that binds cannot be owned without spoiling it. Community arrives in the vigil kept for the dying and in the companionship that endures the limit where no one can take the place of another. It survives by not turning itself into a possession. Thus it cannot be secured by continuous proofs of purity, since proofs convert the bond into property and invite domination. Cancel culture reads the remainder in the relation as a fault to be eliminated. Blanchot reads the remainder as the very condition of any bond that will not turn tyrannical.

Cancel culture treats speech as a device that should deliver clean intentions and instant legibility. When speech stumbles at the limit, the stumble is taken as evidence of guilt. Confession is demanded to repair the breach. Confession then extends to total disclosure, so that ambiguity can be driven out. Blanchot’s scene is the opposite. At the limit, language is drawn toward what it cannot include. Testimony frays where it most matters. The disaster ruins everything while leaving everything intact. To insist on complete legibility at this edge is to deny the nature of speech. It produces a counterfeit clarity through procedures that cannot hold what they claim to judge. What follows is not knowledge but theatre. In this theatre, silence is treated as evasion and hesitation is treated as contempt. 

The clash is simple. Cancel culture wants speech to function like a contract that either satisfies a clause or breaks it. Blanchot hears language as an approach to an outside that resists ownership, so that truth appears in the very failure of mastery. The contract model punishes the stammer. The other model recognises in the stammer the index of seriousness.

Cancel culture operates within a restricted economy. Every act is counted for or against. Recognition and harm are balanced like a ledger. The preferred image is restitution through calibrated penalties and displays of rectitude. Bataille’s work expands the frame. Every society generates an accursed share, an excess that must be spent. If it is not spent lucidly, it returns as mischief or violence. Expenditure, festival, eroticism, laughter, and grief are forms in which the excess is released without being harnessed to utility. Sovereignty, for Bataille, is the moment in which a being ceases to serve ends and touches a useless summit. Cancel culture replaces these forms with procedures that treat surplus affect as evidence to be archived and redeployed. Anger and shame are not allowed to spend themselves. They are conserved and weaponised through infinite commentary and endless trials of sincerity. A general economy that knows how to spend is replaced by a restricted economy that hoards resentments as moral capital. Where the first allows transgression to reveal the limit and so preserve it, the second denies transgression until it returns under the sign of punishment.

Consider sacrifice. Cancel culture keeps an appetite for sacrifice while disavowing it. It imagines that exclusion cleanses the space and restores equilibrium. It insists that the body removed is the source of disorder. Bataille reads sacrifice as a dangerous and sacred operation that reveals the truth of communal expenditure while risking violence. He insists that a culture which refuses lucid rituals of loss will find itself inventing ersatz sacrifices in the name of hygiene. The resemblance between cancellation and sacrificial hunger is too close to ignore. An offending figure is paraded, stripped of ambiguity, and expelled to secure the group in an imaginary unity. The rite declares itself on the side of care. Its structure reveals the opposite. It treats the person as a thing through which the group purchases a momentary calm. It confuses the peace of a purge with the work of truth. Bataille’s picture makes the mechanism visible. The expulsion buys a respite from the pressure of surplus that the culture refuses to acknowledge in itself.

Cancel culture is devoted to names. Names of identities, names of infractions, names of enemies and allies, names that fix a person to a stable moral status. Naming here is an act of property and of guarantee. Blanchot and Bataille both unsettle this relation to names. For Blanchot, the neutral voice is the paradoxical condition of truth telling, since the I that seeks mastery is precisely what blocks the appearance of what exceeds it. For Bataille, the festival and the erotic suspend the named identity and allow a trembling communication that goes beyond property. The point is not to abolish names. It is to deny their sovereignty. Cancel culture enthrones the name as the axis of judgement and as the repository of blame. The other tradition withdraws the name at the very moment when something essential is at stake, because only a step back from ownership allows the event to appear. In one frame, identity is a bastion. In the other, identity is a provisional shelter that must sometimes be set aside so that relation can be borne.

Cancel culture demands immediacy. Verdicts must be issued in the tempo of the feed. Delay is coded as cowardice. Bataille thinks time through waste and festival, periods where utility is suspended. Blanchot thinks time through imminence that does not conclude, a waiting that is not for an object but for the event of relation itself. In both, there is a refusal of the haste that cancels the possibility of meaning. Where cancellation insists on quick purification, they insist on duration as the atmosphere in which truth might have room to arrive. The insistence on duration is not a plea for drift. It is a claim that what matters cannot be summoned by will, and that rooms which lack forms of time beyond urgency will populate life with counterfeit victories.

The politics that follows from these starting points diverges at once. Cancel culture practises an administrative moralism. It sets up procedures that present themselves as neutral while they enact the will to secure the space against the very uncertainty that defines social life. The result is constant vigilance without wisdom, and incessant judgement without joy. Blanchot and Bataille do not offer a counter administration. They undercut the metaphysics that makes such administration feel unavoidable. They insist that the other arrives as a demand that cannot be absorbed into the self, and that collective life always includes what escapes the book of accounts. To govern as if these truths were obstacles rather than conditions is to generate the disasters it claims to prevent. The boredom and rage that mark many contemporary interactions are the signs of a restricted economy that has eaten its own rites.

Cancel culture proclaims a mundane ethic while evoking the sacred at every turn. The sacred appears as the untouchable rule, the taboo that brooks no humour, the aura around the injured that forbids proportion. Bataille’s account of the sacred reads these moves as concrete signs of an unmanaged excess. The sacred is the experience of a thing torn from utility and made terrible and alluring. Cultures either acknowledge this experience in lucid forms that bind without mutilating, or they deny it and allow it to possess their politics in the shape of violent purity. The new puritanism in universities is a sacred without thought. It guards itself by treating every laughter as betrayal. It loses the power of laughter to reveal limits without destroying them.

Cancel culture narrates the world as a drama of managing risk. Everything is framed by harm reduction and the removal of contamination. The ideal scene is a clean room, policed by visibility and by protocols that promise to make the future safe. Blanchot and Bataille narrate the world as exposure to what overflows any system of safety. They do not deny harm. They underline the fragility that cannot be eliminated and that calls for a vigilance of another sort, a vigilance that does not aim to foreclose the impossible but to make us capable of sharing it without turning it into a spectacle. Safety in the first account is a property of the room. Safety in the second is a posture within risk that refuses to purchase quiet by betrayal.

The ethics implicit in cancellation is a calculus of innocence. It assigns moral credit and debt to persons and groups and aspires to purity through correction and exile. It discovers innocence in the self that has mastered the codes and demonstrated alignment. Bataille and Blanchot deny that innocence in this sense is either possible or desirable. Bataille would call it servile. Blanchot would call it a denial of the other. What they hold out, in different idioms, is a sobriety that accepts complicity with finitude, a patience that outlasts the frenzy for proof, a seriousness that credits what cannot be assigned. The clash here is not between care and cruelty, but between two theologies of purity. One believes purity can be achieved by social technique. The other believes that any doctrine of purity that ignores the excess at the heart of life becomes violent by necessity.

Cancel culture claims to protect knowledge by clearing away hostile conditions. It reduces knowledge to the correct arrangement of speech acts and the removal of deviant voices. Knowledge becomes procedural compliance. Blanchot does not reduce knowledge to content mastery or to compliance. He treats knowing as attention to what cannot be concluded. He writes for a patience that can remain near the ungraspable without converting it to a badge of ownership. Bataille treats knowledge as something that cannot be cut away from the moments in which life leaves usefulness. He wants a knowing that is also an inner experience, a breaking of the shell of the self. In their combined light, a university that makes safety an absolute and reduces thought to rites of alignment is a parody of itself. It reproduces order and the feeling of virtue. It forgets why one thinks at all.

Cancel culture relies on authority that is both moral and administrative. It claims to speak from the place of harm and to wield the instruments of order. It thus fuses the vulnerability of injury with the power of decree, and it weaponises empathy as jurisdiction. Blanchot and Bataille reserve authority for moments in which the world breaks the shell of mastery. Authority is the weight of the outside, the shock of waste, the call that has no author. To the extent that an institution honours this authority, it refuses to fashion itself as a machine for producing innocence and chooses instead to become a place where the remainder can be borne. To the extent that it forgets this, it will invent gods that punish in the name of care.

Set in these terms, the conflict is not an intra left squabble over tone. It is a philosophical choice between an administrative moralism that imagines the social as a system of guarantees and an account of community and value that insists on the unowned and the excessive as the very ground on which we meet. The first will go on multiplying procedures and exclusions and will call each repetition a victory. The second will remain foreign to institutions that crave proof, since it asks that we hold to what interrupts proof. Blanchot and Bataille name a demand that cancels the dream of purity even as it deepens the claim of justice, a demand that cannot be satisfied by spectacle or by the theatre of correction. If universities are now arenas where cancellation plays out as a politics of purification, then the dispute with these two writers is fatal. Either one believes that the bond we need appears only when we stop turning one another into property and when we consent to spend what we cannot keep, or one persists in a moral bookkeeping that calls every remainder a crime. There is no modest reconciliation between them, only the question of which world one is willing to live in.