Hadrien Laroche was born in Paris; he completed his doctorate under Jacques Derrida in 1997 and has written three French-language novels. Derrida considered Larouche as "one of the most talented and original thinkers of his generation.”
David Homel was born and raised in Chicago in 1952. He has been a journalist, editor, literary translator, and teacher, and has won numerous awards for translation, including the Governor General's Award for Literature, Canada's highest literary honor.

The final decades of Jean Genet's life were preoccupied with the struggles of the disenfranchised: the Black Panthers, Baader-Meinhoff, and the Palestinians. Laroche's book is a careful philosophical and historical reading of these groups and Genet's relation to them.