 It can also be associated more recently, with the emphasis placed upon absence or deferral by both Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes nothingness from nothing.He writes, “Nothingness is not nothing ["rien"]...There is no ontology without the dialectic or the paradox of a meontology...Nothing is the thing tending toward its pure and simple being of a thing.” Nothing is “the vanishing, momentary quality of the smallest amount of beingness ("étantité").” 

For Emmanuel Levinas, what was meontological was what had meaning beyond being, beyond ontology; for him this was the ethical, the primary demand of the other in the face-to-face encounter.