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Abstract The essay analyses the letter that Jacques Derrida sent to Jean Genet in 1971 as a contribution to an anthology compiled in honour of George Jackson who was imprisoned at Soledad Prison. Derrida had some reservations towards the attempt to get French writers and intellectuals to defend Jackson, not because he did not support the fight of the oppressed black population in the US, but because he did not want to speak in their name, thereby reproducing the very submission that had to be critiqued.
Keywords Derrida, Genet, George Jackson, commitment, Black Panthers
'With the best intentions in the world, with the most sincere moral indignation in the face of what, in effect, remains unbearable and inadmissible, one could then lock up again that which one says one wants to liberate' . ' It's Derrida. He is writing a letter to Jean Genet. The letter is dated August 20 197 1 .2 At that time Genet was busy mobilising the French intellectual milieu in defence of George Jackson, the 28-year-old African-American accused of killing a prison guard in the Soledad Correctional Training Facility in California. Jackson's case was front-page news in the USA as well as in Western Europe. Genet was already involved in the fight of Black Americans against racism and the year before had written the introduction to the French publication of the letters that Jackson had written and collected in the book Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.
Derrida did not doubt the Tightness of Jackson's fight, and he had already signed the statement of support for Jackson that Genet had drafted, Appel pour un comité de soutien aux militants politiques noirs emprisonnés'. Derrida agreed that African-Americans in the USA were fighting a battle against oppression and racism that was worth supporting. Nonetheless he was not altogether sure that it was the right thing to line up with Genet and other French intellectuals and speak out on behalf of Jackson; he felt it was necessary at least to express his hesitancy or doubt. The problem for Derrida was that one risked ending up speaking for Jackson instead of Jackson himself, whose problem was precisely that he was already without a voice, thus confirming the submission and exclusion that...