In 1994, Derrida published the Politics of Friendship, a major work that followed on the heels of 1993's Specters of Marx and Khora. The latter two, while generally considered among Derrida's most important statements on Marx and Plato, were also, as he acknowledges, long deferred continuations of dialogues begun in his seminar twenty years prior. As I have shown (2016: chapter 2), Specters of Marx and Khora while possessed of undoubtedly complex genealogies, in many ways represent a settling of accounts with Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, and the editorial collective that surrounded the avantgarde journal, Tel Quel. In the early 1970s, in the wake of the failed May 68 student uprising in Paris, political turmoil swept the lecture halls and seminar rooms of France. Many, searching for an authentically revolutionary alternative to the failed model of Soviet Marxism, turned to Mao's theory of cultural revolution. When Derrida refused to commit himself, there was a quiet but decisive break with Tel Quel. As a result, the once fast friends, Derrida, Sollers, and Kristeva, never spoke again, even once Sollers and Kristeva renounced politics upon their return from China (de Nooy 1998: 79–80, 90–91; Peeters 2010: 221–22, 263–292, 419–20).