Editorial [CounterText, 9(1)]

Abstract

This is the twenty-fifth number of CounterText, and it is perhaps appropriate that it is a special issue inspired by Roland Barthes that marks the occasion. Barthes’ work pioneered, and remains a touchstone for, various modes of writing within which post-literary awareness and critical practice encounter each other: even to the point, it is tempting to say, of co-inciting counter identification. Arguably the text by Barthes that remains both the most appealing and the most enduringly inexhaustible prefiguration of such writing is Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977). ‘A figure is well-founded if at least one person can say: “gosh how true that is. . . ”’, Barthes suggests towards the beginning of the volume, and it could be said that a different scene of writing – an essai but more than that; not literature or critique or ‘theory’ but all and none of these – found figure in Fragments: one whose lineaments and import call for renewed recognition and reception. It is in response to that call that this special issue of CounterText, under the title Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again, was conceived.