Up Aporia Creek

Abstract

Concluding his ‘Reflections in Conclusion’ to Aesthetics and Politics, Fredric Jameson counsels us to embrace the aporia — ‘an enigma for thought’ — left behind by the failure of the political aesthetics on display to resolve any of their ‘extinct but still virulent intellectual conflicts’; the aporia ‘contains within its structure the crux of a history beyond which we have not yet passed’.¹ The Oxford English Dictionary, if you look up ‘aporia’ in it, quotes a lovely 1589 definition of the term as a figure of rhetoric:

Aporia, or the Doubtful. [So] called ... because oftentimes we will seeme to cast perils, and make doubt of things which by a plaine manner of speech we might affirm or deny him.²

And Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, had occasion in 1667 to remark, ‘The greatest Wits in the World have been... Sceptical or Aporetical’. The word comes from the Greek for no passage or way; and some readers may be tempted to murmur ‘No way! ’ as they observe how the high eloquence and sinewy argumentation of these great wits of the Marxist intellectual world — Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno — are marshalled to put each other’s positions endlessly in doubt.

Screen Education, no. 31, Summer 1979.