Aporia

An aporia, or double bind, is the point where language turns on itself: caught between two meanings that cannot both hold, one reaches an impasse where no meaning seems possible.

Put simply Derrida's "aporia" or "double bind": the point where language contradicts itself. Caught between two meanings that cannot both hold, you reach a dead end where no meaning seems possible.

Shore's own illustration of aporia is the Stalinist terror: everyone had to watch ceaselessly for enemies lurking anywhere, even as history's iron laws supposedly guaranteed the communist future.

Put simply Shore's own example of a self-contradiction ("aporia") is Stalin's terror. People had to watch constantly for hidden enemies everywhere, yet history's laws supposedly guaranteed communism's victory anyway.

Yet "on the other hand," Derrida argues, the whole of de Man's antisemitic article is "organized as an indictment of vulgar antisemitism": its meaning undoes itself.

Put simply Derrida then argues the other side: read closely, his friend Paul de Man's antisemitic article is built as an attack on crude antisemitism. Its meaning, he claims, undoes itself.

Shore sometimes finds it hard not to suspect something psychologically self-serving in de Man's embrace of aporia: for someone wanting to disown his past, denying any persisting self is appealing.

Put simply Shore admits she sometimes cannot help suspecting that de Man's embrace of a philosophy where meaning undoes itself was self-serving. For someone wanting to cut himself off from his past, believing in no lasting self is appealing.

Derrida's aporia of forgiveness: because forgiveness forgives only what cannot be forgiven, it must declare itself to be impossibility as such.

Put simply Derrida: forgiveness only applies to what cannot be forgiven. So it is caught in a contradiction (an "aporia"): it must present itself as impossibility itself.