What is Aporia?

 Aporia means a situation of irresolvable difficulty or doubt, which ends in puzzlement rather than resolution, and which fail to supply convincing definitions of sought-after concepts like truth and virtue. The critic Paul de Man explored the ‘Aporia’ as a crucial feature of literature. So that we find ourselves blocked off from the knowledge that the text seemed to promise us. What literary texts “know,” according to de Man, is that knowledge is aporetic, that is, unavailable, because it is subject to a double bind (dilemma). Hamlet's famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy is an extended example.

 

In the critical terminology of Deconstruction, the term is frequently used in the sense of a final impasse (a situation in which no progress is possible, especially because of disagreement) or Paradox: a point at which a text's self contradictory meanings can no longer be resolved, or at which the text undermines its own most fundamental presuppositions. It is this Aporia that deconstructive readings set out to identify in any given work or passage, leading to the claim that the text's meanings are finally 'undecidable'.