Aporia as a Figure of Speech

Aporia is a figure of speech in which the speaker expresses real or simulated doubt or perplexity. The adjective is aporetic.

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Aposiopesis: The Broken Figure of Speech

By Richard Nordquist

In classical rhetoric, aporia means placing a claim in doubt by developing arguments on both sides of an issue. In the terminology of deconstruction, aporia is a final impasse or paradox--the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.

• Etymology: From the Greek, "without passage"
• Pronunciation: eh-POR-ee-eh

Examples and Observations

• David Mikics
  Scholars have described as aporetic early Socratic dialogues like the Protagoras (ca. 380 BCE), which end in puzzlement rather than resolution, and which fail to supply convincing definitions of sought-after concepts like truth and virtue. At the end of the Protagoras, wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Socrates and Protagoras resemble 'two bald men searching for a comb.'
  
• Peter Falk
  I don't think it's proving anything, Doc. As a matter of fact, I don't even know what it means. It's just one of those things that gets in my head and keeps rolling around in there like a marble.
  
• William Wordsworth
  If living sympathy be theirs
  And leaves and airs,
  The piping breeze and dancing tree
  Are all alive and glad as we:
  Whether this be truth or no
  I cannot tell, I do not know;
  Nay--whether now I reason well,
  I do not know, I cannot tell.
  
• Ford Maddox Ford
  Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man--the man with the right to existence--a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.
  
• Julian Wolfreys
  A particularly striking example of the experience of the aporetic appears in Karl Marx's consideration of the commodity fetish, where he finds it logically impossible to explain, within the limits of his discourse, what transforms material into its mystified form as desired commodity, and what invests the commodity object with its commodified mystique.
• David Lodge
  Robin wrote the word with a coloured felt-tip marker on the whiteboard screwed to the wall of her office. 'Aporia. In classical rhetoric it means real or pretended uncertainty about the subject under discussion. Deconstructionists today use it to refer to more radical kinds of contradiction or subversion of logic or defeat of the reader's expectation in a text. You could say that it's deconstruction's favourite trope. Hillis Miller compares it to following a mountain path and then finding that it gives out, leaving you stranded on a ledge, unable to go back or forwards. It actually derives from a Greek word meaning 'a pathless path.'