In the previous chapter we explored the relationship between Ricœur's hermeneutic phenomenology and Derrida's deconstruction by moving the ontological question from a focus on ‘what?’ to ‘who?’ While allowing us to make progress in understanding how the question of alterity in Derrida must be reconsidered when we are coming to grips with Ricœur's hermeneutics of the self and narrative identity, the investigation also opened, without satisfactorily resolving, the issue of coherence and multiplicity. In stating that the various discourses of Ricœur's hermeneutics of the self cohere, we left hanging the question as to how they cohere, which is precisely what is at stake between deconstruction and phenomenology at this point. In order to address Ricœur's response to the question of coherence, we turn now to one sphere of interpretation which, in the last decade of his life, he explored at length: the sphere of justice. In this chapter we shall argue that the way Ricœur develops his notion of justice (through readings of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot) is through a meditation on the coherence of diverse discourses, navigating between the Scylla of reductive violence and the Charybdis of paralysing incommensurability, between recuperated unity and disseminated multiplicity. This will complete our Ricœurean response to the searching ontological questions posed to his philosophy by deconstruction.

To anyone studying the progression of Ricœur's thought, it is surprising that it was only in his later years that he gave himself to a sustained consideration of the question of the just and the area of legal interpretation, though in truth they were never completely absent from his earlier work, though often only obliquely apparent.