aporia

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

2. (philosophy, post-structuralism) An insoluble contradiction, especially in a text's meaning; a logical impasse suggested by a text or speaker.Examples: "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."Synonyms: impasse, paradox, contradiction