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Extremes of theory may demand extremes of tone. This book opens: "This book is not written to help anybody." That tone is sustained throughout, a resistance to the rhetoric of helpfulness, explanation, application. Whenever one speaks about theory these days one is liable to be asked "But how can I use this? What is its purpose/function/relevance?" from subjects of so untheoretical a cast of mind that the distinction between theoria and praxis can be grasped only to be crushed. Pepper renounces the helpful and abjures the useful: his book is about extremes of theory, and belongs itself within a mode of intense abstraction worthy of its subjects: Adorno, Derrida, de Man, Blanchot, Szondi. Abstraction is not the precise term, nor is 'subjects.' Pepper does not build a discourse about these theorists; he admires each of them for their resistance to the thematic, for the attempt to reduce the thematic to the rhetorical, to enhance the rhetorical to the point that the familiar tedious question no longer need be asked: what is this text, this discourse, 'about'? Pepper's essays are not written about x or y: "an essay at Paul de Man" is the subtitle of the book's longest chapter. Those theorists who have removed themselves from the thematic are not now, in finding Pepper's approval, merely to be re-inscribed in a thematic or a narrative of their own constitution. The rhetorical challenge of Pepper's text is thus to draw our attention to the distinction between the thematic and the rhetorical without succumbing to the thematic. The game is won and lost in all of its rhetorical gambits, recursions, confessions, self-doubts, self-recriminations, gambits whose purpose is not always and never solely rhetorical, but is always counter-thematic. At the moment when theme seems ready to raise its solar head and cast brightness all around, the rhetoric of doubt occludes and overcasts. In the very middle of his book (112) Pepper gives an epigraph:"'We are all thematic readers with a guilty conscience." The ascriptive footnote reads: "A remark attributed to Paul de Man in the early eighties, no doubt apocryphal." It is the sheer inconsequence of the latter phrase, the virtual oxymoron of 'no doubt' and 'apocryphal,' that both inscribes and refutes not just theme and narrative in general, but the theme and the narrative of the making of this book: Pepper has been of the school of de Man, yet in the rigorous terms of that formation, there can be no school, no filiation, no narrative of succession: "the injunction to read what I, Paul de Man, read, not what I write, this noli me legere..." (94). Harold Bloom is absent from this book, in name. The tangent of Bloom's relationship to de Man is nowhere better measured than in Pepper's anxieties, of which the chief is that one might make of influence itself a theme. The chapter on de Man is entitled "Absolute Constructions" and it concerns itself with a grammatical class, a clause that is independent of its grammatical surroundings, which "has something of the unconditioned condition about it." In the jargon of composition it might be known as the modified that's allowed to dangle. The miracle of these eighty pages, in which we range from Jakobson to Caillois, from Levinas to Lovejoy, is that at no point does Pepper resort to anything so obvious, so vulgar, as a claim that absolute constructions are characteristic or symptomatic of de Man's prose. That would be to make a point. Indeed, Pepper points to not a single instance of the absolute construction in de Man. Instead, and most perplexingly, he cites a long passage from the preface to The Rhetoric of Romanticism, and comments: "This is a cruel paragraph, and I am not talking about the split infinitives...." But there is no split infinitive in the cited excerpt. Pepper is far too wary to be simply mistaken; he is almost neurotically astute in grammatical details, so one must suppose him here to be playing with demonstratives and their absence, just as a prestideixitator should. The first chapter, on Adorno, addresses the singular and its recuperation through the aphorism, which is to be conceived (though "the discourse of the concept is over" [45]) as an 'absolute construction' at the level of - and therefore free from - syntax and dialectic. Adorno is cited on Hegel as source and avatar of Terror: "[w]ith serene indifference he opts for the liquidation of the particular" (30). From here, through Derrida on Heidegger, to the analysis of Szondi's analysis of Celan's transformation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 105, the realization of terror is present, on the edge of articulation. Somehow - and should one even attempt to unmask such a humane device? - Pepper combines the resistance to theme in the name of rheme with a decisive and passionate ethics. Never is there anything so coarse as a direct allusion to Heidegger's politics or to de Man's journalistic occupation. Another unmentioned name - and it is the richness of this book that the narrowest focus concentrates the broadest scope - is that of Karl Kraus, for whom the future of mankind could be determined by the right placement of a comma. The essay on, or at, Blanchot's Celui ne m'accompagnait pas is motivated by that text's long record of resistance to criticism and even to commentary - simply because it is so difficult to establish what the narrative is 'about.' In Blanchot's narrative without proper names, Pepper attends to the play of tense and pronoun. If there is no theme to identify, can we take an interest, or have an interest in a text? Interest is a bad word in Pepper's lexicon, for it assumes advantage, it posits the text as a site of exploitation. Pepper prefers obsession, and he is candidly obsessed with what refuses to solicit our interest, what declines to be interesting. With some gentle invocations of Levinas, Pepper insists on the ethical practice of non-thematic reading. The argument is clinched - for how else (really) could a volume containing five essays be read except dialectically, and dramatically? - in the final essay, most cunningly entitled 'Afterword' to signify its theme (translation/belatedness) as well as (or rather than) its position. In Celan's translation of Sonnet 105, Szondi makes much of 'Ich find, erfind' [I find, invent] as audibly 'I find, he finds': "the prefix er carries the connotation of the personal pronoun er." Pepper wonders why at this point Szondi does not go back to line six, where the play is the more obvious for the pronominal er being present: 'und keiner ist beständiger als er' [no one is more constant than he]. "Er, er, er." writes Pepper, for this note: "I cease to underline 'er' at this point since.... while belonging to language, it does not belong to any particular language, hence not to the impure German language..." (235). Er could also name and be named by schwa, that minimal vocalization, the pure slack of rhythm. Pepper goes this far: "Instead of saying that this is a poem about er... we might say... that this is a poem in er" (243). A poem then in a pure language, but a poem (like any poems) whose slacks alone are pure. The ictus always contaminates, marks and insists in the impure singularity of deixis. This book is riddled and peppered with figures of impurity, stain, scar, trace. Against the apparent purism and puritanism of deconstruction, Pepper argues that it is thematic readings which purify and which, in the interest of purification, comply with terror. In the rhetorical singular is the fascination of what's impure; it is figures of impurity which resist the general and the synthetic. Most submerged of all figures is catachresis, whose Nietzschean army of subalterns, privates, sappers and corpor(e)als does its work in the dark, undoing, over and over again, the universal claim for the pure lucidity of language. In renouncing usefulness and help Pepper's book takes its place in that darkness; it does not ask to be read. Merely noticing it, as an item of catachresis within the discursive tedium of illumination, guidance and explanation, is its own ample and singular reward.
Charles Lock
University of Copenhagen