We began this book by opening three sets of questions: (1) What is the relation ‘between’ phenomenology and deconstruction? (2) How can contemporary French thought develop responses to the problems of alterity and coherence? (3) In the light of these concerns, what resources are there in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur and Jean-Luc Nancy for thinking ontology otherwise? We have, of course, not been able exhaustively to investigate each of these questions, but that has not been our aim. Rather we have sought to show that the three sets of questions are each enhanced by treatment in relation to each other. It is the aim of this conclusion to argue for the success, and irreducibility, of this approach.

It became clear from the early encounters we staged between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida that a recurring question posed to the phenomenologist, whether existential or hermeneutic, is ‘how do you know?’ How does Merleau-Ponty know that the world is ‘pregnant with meaning’? How does Ricœur know that narrative and life are ‘intertwined’? It also became clear that there would be no quick or simple response to these questions, for any putatively speedy answer would have to perform an impossibility: it would have to ground knowledge on something radically other to itself which it could articulate in its own terms. It would, literally, have to think the unthinkable. Nevertheless, it has gradually emerged that there are resources in the phenomenological tradition for responding persuasively to deconstructive questioning, provided that we take an indirect, oblique approach.