In this lively and subtle essay, historian Laure Murat restores order to the catch-all hodgepodge of "cancel culture."

A sense of unease has settled over contemporary culture: classic texts and some bestsellers are being rewritten to purge them of racism and sexism, or are subjected to mounting demands for contextualization. But what if the question hasn’t been properly framed? What if the issue is often money, not ethics? What if censorship isn’t where we think it is? What if all these precautions ultimately produce a perverse effect? Laure Murat reshuffles the deck in a controversy which, due to its constantly escalating nature, has blurred the real stakes of artistic creation and its political dimension.