DERRIDA’S APORIA

The word “aporia” originally came from Greek which, in philosophy, meant a
philosophical puzzle or state of being in puzzle, and a rhetorically useful expression of doubt.
In contemporary theoretical parlance, the term has more been associated with deconstructive
criticism, especially with Derridean theory of differance, as a reaction to structuralist
interpretations of texts, denoting “a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which
the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs
itself” (Derrida). ‘Aporia’ is used by Derrida to refer to what he often calls the ‘blind spots’
of any metaphysical argument. In other words, the gap or lacuna between what a text
means to say and what it is constrained to mean creates aporia.

The speech–writing opposition, for example, could be said to be sustained by an

aporia within the opposition ‘itself ’: on the one hand speech can be seen as having to come
before writing on the basis only of avoiding that aporia altogether, while on the other the
aporia can be shown as necessary to the very constitution of speech and writing as opposites.
According to Derrida’s deconstruction of the opposition, however, it is writing which comes
first. Hence the aporia – or the ‘aporetic’ moment – takes the form of something that cannot
be explained within standard rules of logic: writing can be understood as coming after speech
only because in fact it comes before speech. In its most general form, this may be put as
follows: differance always comes before difference(s).

Derrida, for instance, cites the inherent contradictions at work in Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s use of the words “culture” and “nature” by demonstrating that Rousseau’s sense
of the self’s innocence (in nature) is already corrupted by the concept of culture (and
existence) and vice-versa. Derrida has also described the paradoxes that afflict notions like
giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning. He argues that the condition of their possibility is
also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility.