Eulogising in the immediate aftermath of his contemporary's suicide in 1995, Jacques Derrida describes ‘the flustering, really flustering experience of a closeness or a nearly total affinity’ evoked by the work of Gilles Deleuze (Derrida 2001a: 192/235). Deleuze was, he continues:

For all Derrida's knowingly Deleuzian language in the above citation, the idea of an affinity, or complicity, between the two is belied by the merely fleeting references to each other's work. Despite the intimacy of Parisian intellectual circles, there is also only a single recorded exchange between the two, a brief discussion on the politics of eternal return in Nietzsche, instigated by Pierre Klossowski in 1972 (Klossowski 1973: 111–16). Although there were other encounters, and even a promise of dialogue left unfulfilled by Deleuze's death (Nancy 2005: 8n), it seems safe to say that Derrida was never ‘volé’, stolen, by Deleuze in the way that Félix Guattari was ‘volé’.