In the first chapter we asked if, in the light of the questions Derrida raises in Le Toucher, we can still speak, phenomenologically, about a worldly meaningfulness. We saw that, although Derrida's worries about what Merleau-Ponty means by ‘presence’ and ‘intuitionism’ do provide cause for concern, there is ‘another’ Merleau-Ponty (to whom Derrida alludes but does not explore at any length) who is not prey to the same accusations. We also began to see that Derrida's reading rests substantially on a particular understanding of the notion of ‘contact’ as immediate proximity, which it is by no means clear that Merleau-Ponty shares. In this chapter we return to the latter problem, this time not from the angle of perception but from that of language. It is in his thinking about the relation of language and the world that Merleau-Ponty is closest to Derridean concerns, and in turning to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language we shall argue that, contrary to Derrida's assumption, Merleau-Ponty's construal of the relationship of language and the ontological need not be reductively violent. Deploying the two key motifs of being ‘in the interrogative mode’ and the call and response structure of world and language, we shall show how what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘work of expression’ offers an alternative to deconstruction's abyss between subject and world, and we shall begin to interrogate deconstructive questioning itself in order to explore possible phenomenological responses to it.