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Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late work locates humans within a wild or brute being that sustains a synergy among life forms. His Nature lectures explored the philosophical implications of evolutionary biology and animal studies, and with The Visible and the Invisible describe a horizontal kinship between humans and other animals. This work offers a striking alternative to Heidegger's panicky insistence on an abyss between humans and other animals that Derrida questions but cannot seem to discard. For Merleau-Ponty, literary works probe the invisible realm of wildness that is our only environment, a realm full of language and meaningfully experienced by all animals. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late work defines a chiasmic ontology in which human experience is part of a wild or brute being that sustains all life and provides a synergy among its distinct forms. His Nature lectures at the Collège de France explored the philosophical implications of modern science, including evolutionary biology and animal studies, and together with the unfinished manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible gestured toward a horizontal kinship between humans. This work offers a striking alternative to Heidegger's panicky insistence on the abyss between humans and other animals, an abyss that Derrida questions but cannot seem to discard in The Animal that Therefore I Am. Matthew Calarco wonders why Derrida would resolutely refuse to abandon the humananimal distinction and "why he would use this language of ruptures and abysses when the largest bodies of empirical knowledge we have concerning human beings and animals strongly contest such language." 1 But Derrida explicitly resists any claims of "biological continuism, whose sinister connotations we are well aware of. .. ." 2 As a Jew he might have been particularly aware of the cruel history of Social Darwinism, eugenics and animal coding for abjecting human groups during the twentieth century. However, accepting a continuum between our species and

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