Aporia - Definitions

Definitions

Definitions of the term aporia have varied throughout history. The Oxford English Dictionary includes two forms of the word: the adjective, “aporetic” which it defines as “to be at a loss,” “impassable,” and “inclined to doubt, or to raise objections”; and the noun form “aporia,” which it defines as the “state of the aporetic” and “a perplexity or difficulty.” The dictionary entry also includes two early textual uses, which both refer to the term’s rhetorical (rather than philosophical) usage.

In George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) aporia is “the Doubtful, called...because oftentimes we will seem to caste perils, and make doubts of things when by a plaine manner of speech we might affirm or deny .” In another reference from 1657, J. Smith’s Mystical Rhetoric, the term becomes “a figure whereby the speaker sheweth that he doubteth, either where to begin for the multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing” (OED). Herbert Weir Smyth's Greek Grammar (1956) also focuses on the rhetorical usage by defining aporia as “an artifice by which a speaker feigns doubts as to where he shall begin or end or what he shall do or say” (674).

More modern sources, perhaps because they come after the advent of post-structuralism, have chosen to omit the rhetorical usage of the term. In William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature, for example, aporia is identified as “a difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision” while also noting that critics such as Derrida have employed the term to “indicate a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself” (39).