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.

• Contents 
• Introduction
• PART ONE 
• Toward the Limits of Reflection
• 1. 
• Defining Reflection
• 2. 
• The Philosophy of Reflection
• 3. 
• The Self-Destruction of Reflection
• Isolated Reflection
• Philosophical Reflection
• Speculative or Absolute Reflection
• 4. 
• Identity, Totality, and Mystic Rapture
• 5. 
• Post-Hegelian Criticism of Reflexivity
• 6. 
• Beyond Reflection: The Interlacings of Heterology
• PART TWO 
• On Deconstruction
• 7. 
• Abbau, Destruktion, Deconstruction
• 8. 
• Deconstructive Methodology
• The Propaedeutics of Deconstruction
• Against Neutrality
• Infrastructural Accounting
• The Marginal Inscription of the Ground
• The Bipartite Operation of Deconstruction
• 9. 
• A System beyond Being
• The Infrastructural Chain
• The General Theory of Doubling
• The General System
• PART THREE 
• Literature or Philosophy?
• 10. 
• Literature in Parentheses
• 11. 
• The Inscription of Universality
• Writing
• Text
• Metaphor
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index