Editorial [CounterText, 11(3)]

Abstract

The oblique stroke in Omission/s performs the very act it names: it both divides and connects, marking at once singularity and plurality, event and process, absence and its afterlife. This issue of CounterText, guest-edited by Raffaella Antinucci, approaches omission not as a void but as a mode of presence – a way of thinking through what language excludes, forgets, or cannot articulate. To speak of omission is to acknowledge that every text, every act of representation, is shadowed by what it leaves unsaid. The essays gathered here arise from that awareness, exploring omission not as an error to be corrected but as a structural and often creative condition. In doing so, they illuminate what might be called the countertextual ethics of absence: the recognition that meaning depends as much on erasure, silence, and lacuna as on articulation. [excerpt]