aporia

noun

1. (rhetoric)An expression of deliberation with oneself regarding uncertainty or doubt as to how to proceed.

   “Aporia oft in doubt and fear will rest, And reason with itself what may be best.”

   “Meanings are superposed in an aporia – not ‘either/or’, but ‘and/and’.”

   “What they intend sickens and frightens them, and they can never speak of it directly. Instead, wrapped in whispers are ellipses, euphemisms, mumbled aporia followed by throat-clearing and a brisk change of subject.”

2. An apparently insoluble contradiction or tension, especially in a text's meaning; a logical impasse suggested by a text or speaker; a paradox.

   “But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health.”

   “EL James's multimillion selling series of novels ‘encodes the aporias of heterosexual relationships’, according to Professor Eva Illouz[.]”

   “Plato believed that the core impulse to philosophizing lies in aporia, the point at which, in struggling to understand a phenomenon or answer a question, we come up against a seemingly irresolvable contradiction.”