Historical and philosophical prerequisites for the formation of the concept of “cancel culture”

The article analyzes the historical and philosophical prerequisites for the formation of the phenomenon of the cancel culture. The relevance of the study is due to the need to conceptualize this concept in terms of socio-cultural and political transformations of modern society. The methodology of the study relies on an expanded understanding of the cancel culture as a worldview that seeks to ignore or exclude both the culture of people and events and the historical memory associated with them from the public space. The paper analyzes the main philosophical trends that have resorted to considering the mechanisms of social and cultural oblivion, starting with the philosophy of the Cynics and ending with the method of phenomenological reduction. It is emphasized that, at first glance, the new phenomenon of cancel culture has a long history, and attempts to exclude uncomfortable or unacceptable sociocultural patterns of behavior and thinking have almost always been present in the social practice of mankind. In this context, the cancel culture is a special case of the counterculture as a mechanism for the destruction of another culture by interrupting the continuity as the destruction of the mechanism of its functioning.