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The Tain of the Mirror

The Tain of the Mirror

Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection

Rodolphe Gasché

ISBN 9780674867017

Publication date: 10/15/1988

Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror (tain names the tinfoil, or lusterless back of the mirror) explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible. Rodolphe Gasché does what no one has done before in many discussions of Derrida, namely to tie his work in an authoritative way to its origins in the history of the criticism of reflexivity.

Praise

  • A formidable book… [A] splendidly full and orderly synthesis of Derrida’s thought, which makes a meticulous case for him as a philosopher of real substance, given the radical nature of his investigations in the philosophies of language and of meaning.

    —John Sturrock, London Review of Books

Author

  • Rodolphe Gasché is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Book Details

  • 358 pages
  • 6 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Harvard University Press

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