The Antinomy of Cancel Culture: A Study of Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer*
Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and “Right-Wing Thought Today,” this article examines cancel culture’s ethical and aesthetic antinomies through Alfonso Cuarón’s 2024 series Disclaimer*. It argues that cancel culture embodies an antinomy of action: the simultaneous i...
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| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Français |
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2026
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| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and “Right-Wing Thought Today,” this article examines cancel culture’s ethical and aesthetic antinomies through Alfonso Cuarón’s 2024 series Disclaimer*. It argues that cancel culture embodies an antinomy of action: the simultaneous imperatives to enact justice and to recognize ambiguity in human freedom. In practice, however, cancel culture also reproduces cycles of harm, collapsing the singularity of persons into rigid moral certainties. Cuarón stages this failure through Disclaimer’s* melodramatic form, its manipulation of point of view, fantasy and spectatorship, which renders cancel culture as spectacle: a reactionary reckoning that conflates justice with retribution, voice with noise, and implicates viewers in the desire to judge without reflection. Complementing Beauvoir with Lewis R. Gordon’s structural bad faith and Frantz Fanon’s critique of failure, I propose Disclaimer* can function as an existential tool, a work of art that makes felt the ethical costs of failed reciprocal recognition. In doing so, I ask what cancel culture’s antinomies reveal about freedom and moral action in a polarized, mediated world.
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