The incursion of style upon our ability to read, indeed of stylus, of a pointed object that “might be used in a vicious attack against what philosophy appeals to in the name of matter,” as Derrida writes in Spurs, will here take the form of specific tropological concerns that will be given in terms of Paul de Man’s understanding of allegory and reading. Style, inescapably tied to rhetoric and figurativity as a mode of expression, would be a syncope of cognition present in every text. A disruptive possibility of the text that outmatches its potential to be read. Style, seen in these terms, is a certain excess/lack of text that opens to a jouissance of reading, the pain of having read always too much or too little, of always having read otherwise. What the rhetorical structure of reading points to, as we shall see in de Man’s reading of Proust, is the radical impossibility of its closure.