A consideration of Paul Ricœur's hermeneutic phenomenology has allowed us to trace points of (more usually) proximity and (occasionally) divergence between Derrida and Ricœur on questions of alterity and coherence. In terms of alterity, ‘life’ and ‘narrative’ for Ricœur are inextricably intertwined, and the meaning of prefigured action is not posited but attested in the context of a hermeneutic wager: it is a ‘broken attestation’. Similarly, Derrida cannot justify the ‘good’ of alterity, but assumes it. As regards the question of coherence, Ricœur's thought deals with a constant tension between chaos and cosmos: narrative is a ‘discordant concordance’ and justice is ‘conflictual- consensual’. Furthermore, the relation of incommensurable terms in the notion of justice is a matter not of correspondence but of translation and compromise, and coherence is achieved on the basis not of reciprocity but of mutuality. Derrida, elaborating a notion of gift-giving and receiving which privileges reciprocity, cannot avail himself of the coherence that mutuality, compromise and translation afford Ricœur. We found it possible to address these two problems more adequately, however, by moving away from considering the what to the that and the who of the problem, from what is asked in the question ‘How do you know?’ to the event of the question and its provocation to ‘justify yourself!’

This raised a further question. Is there any way of mediating between the positions we have called ‘Ricœur’ and ‘Derrida’ and, more broadly, between ‘phenomenology’ and ‘deconstruction’, the ‘difficult’ and the ‘impossible’? This tantalising prospect brings with it a host of further questions.