The Tain and the Tain: China Miéville’s Gift of Uncanny London

Imagine that mirrors would not be in the world, simply included in all onta and their images,but that things “present,”on thecontrary,wouldbe in them. Imagine that mirrors (shadows, reflections, phantasm etc, etc.) would no longer be comprehendedwithin the structure of the ontology . . . but would rather envelop it in its entirety, producing here or there, a particular, extremely determinate effect. —(Derrida 1981, 324)