Reading Badiou on Althusser, Derrida flinched at the separation of 'friends' and 'enemies' and hard-line ethics of a judgmental communism. Recent biographical work, e.g. Peeters, reveals a fairly consistent but (until the mid-1990s at least) unpublicized position in Derrida’s relations to Marxism, going back to at least his encounters with the Althusserians, in which it was in fact a commitment to being ‘on the left’ which meant (as he puts it in a letter to Granel in 1971) that the risk of giving an ‘impression of apoliticism, or rather “apraxia”’, was tied to the strategic requirement to avoid appearing to take a reactionary position in criticizing current orthodoxies on Marx: ‘I’ll never fall into anti-communism, so I’m shutting my mouth.....’