Structuring absence
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“A structuring absence [...] refers to an issue, or even a set of facts or an argument, that a text cannot ignore, but which it deliberately skirts round or otherwise avoids, thus creating the biggest 'holes' in the text, fatally, revealingly misshaping the organic whole assembled with such craft."--The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (2013) by Richard Dyer |
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"Structuring absence" is a notion in narratology, probably devised by or a reference to Jacques Lacan. It is akin to the elephant in the room.
As of 2022, its first mention in print is in Telos, Issues 21-23, 1974:
- "The exclusion of the “colonizers,” indeed of politics in general, is a "structuring absence” in this film, in much the sense intended by the famous Cahiers du Cinéma article on Young Mr. Lincoln.? It is not that The Sugarland Express should have included a dramatically extraneous political content in order to conform with the wishes of progressive viewers and critics."
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