to be less theological and more sensible on aporia
October 9th, 2009As previously mentioned I’ve been reading a few pages of Derrida’s work on Aporias. Sometimes it’s more fun to write your way through a bunch of ideas instead of just reading and re-reading other people doing the same thing:
There is a kind of aporia at work in the notion of the beyond. This is not immediately obvious because the notion of the beyond is curiously implicated in all aporia in the form of the unbeyondable. For aporia in the sense of an impasse is the limit and end of the beyond. This is a curious relationship to the beyond. The beyond is that which reveals the limit and the end of all else. Aporia is the unbeyondable and this is the only way of thinking the limit of the concept of beyond. The only way of thinking the beyond of the beyond is to think the unbeyondable which is named aporia.
In a theological mode it could be written that everything infinite is essentially aporetic. The infinite is that which is essentially unbeyondable. There is nothing easier in philosophy than indulging in theology but I’m more interested in asking more sensibly if there is a non-theological, that is a non-infinite, aporia.
To attempt to think aporia in a less explicitly theological mode is to try to think that which is persistently relevant without being permanently relevant; that which cannot be put out of play in the phenomenological reduction but remains in play for the forseeable future; that which recurs to thought and on which thought lingers and is to be dwelt upon (but probably not until death). This is how we start to think the aporetic less theologically.
Yet if we think the aporetic less theologically is it still aporetic at all? Would this not be an impasse that is not actually an impasse and an aporia that is not actually aporetic. This problem is only a real problem if we feel a requirement to treat concepts in a strictly formal manner. I think that there could be a role for experience in clearing all this up. The experience of an aporia does not mean that the possibility of going beyond this aporia in the future is denied, just that this possibility is not experienced as a present possibility of the future. The real experience of aporia is not incommensurable with a future possibilty of overcoming that aporia in a future beyond the future that is experienced as expectable.