Both Nancy and Merleau-Ponty appropriate Heidegger's vocabulary in a way that might mislead us into believing that they are largely in agreement with Heidegger's later thinking of Being and situate their own philosophy within its orbit. Such hasty conclusion would miss what is original about each. In Merleau-Ponty's case, his appropriation of Heidegger's notion of Wesen is always mediated by his reading of Husserl and by his search for the opening of sense within the sensible itself. This leads him to understand Being as depth and as the Ineinander of beings and to critique Heidegger for proposing a direct ontology. In his own reappropriation of the later Heidegger's thinking of Being, Nancy, for his part, takes issue with Heidegger's understanding of the withdrawal of Being as something that calls for a guarding or sheltering. In Heidegger, Being would hide behind what is present and be kept in reserve as a kind of super-presence.

In their engagement with Heidegger, both Merleau-Ponty and Nancy seek to undo the metaphysical difference between existentia and essentia in favour of a thinking of existence or presence that is not pure positivity but includes a moment of negativity that is not the other of presence but its opening. The last chapter of this study will track this moment of negativity within the Merleau-Pontian chiasmatic structure of the flesh and Nancy's understanding of being as differance and spacing. Before this can be done, however, it is important to spell out where Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, each in their own way, depart from Heidegger's own thinking of Being.

1. Is Merleau-Ponty's late ontology Heideggerian?

The extent of the influence of Heidegger on Merleau-Ponty, and especially on his later ontology, is widely debated. In his study of Merleau-Ponty's ‘ontological turn’, Vers une ontologie indirecte, Saint Aubert provides a useful survey of the literature on the question. On the one hand, we find authors such as Rudolf Bernet who defend the position that The Visible and the Invisible is ‘one grand meditation on the phenomenological sense of the Heideggerian concept of ontological truth’.