222 Derrida 1963–1983
liquidate the Palestinian resistance’, calling on ‘public opinion and
all democratic forces to bring about a political solution that cannot
be envisaged apart from the right of peoples to self-determination’.^41
A few months later, the George Jackson aff air saw him getting
much more personally involved. Jackson was a Black militant,
incarcerated in a Californian prison; after the death of a white
warden during a riot, he was unjustly accused of murder together
with two other Black prisoners. But the book in which Jackson
relates his story, Soledad Brothers, had a profound impact on
American public opinion and turned this young twenty-eight-year-
old American Black into a symbol of the struggle of the Black
Panthers. The work was published in French by Gallimard with
a preface by Jean Genet, who had spent three months with Black
revolutionaries, and engaged on a veritable tour round American
universities with them. In July 1971, when Jackson was due to be
sentenced, Genet launched an appeal for a committee of support for
the imprisoned Black political militants,* then asked the signatories
to add their own contributions to a book about Jackson.
Derrida wrote his reply on the crossing to the United States, in the
form of a letter to Genet. But on 21 August 1971, two days before
his trial was due to begin, Jackson was shot down by the police,
offi cially for attempted escape. The book lost its raison d’être and
the very subtle piece written by Derrida was never published. While
restating his support for the cause of Black prisoners, he told Genet
of his reluctance about the form chosen. He was mainly concerned
that such a work might reduce ‘this huge issue to a more or less
literary, or even publishing, event – to an intelligentsia busy whip-
ping up signatures and providing itself with a certain French, even
Parisian, image’.
That’s why I’m still hesitating to take part in the collective
action you mentioned to me; and that’s why I fear the way that- The appeal was accompanied by a manifesto by Genet called ‘For George
Jackson’, reprinted in his posthumous work The Declared Enemy: Texts and
Interviews, ed. by Albert Dichy, tr. by Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2004) – fi rst published in French in 1991. In the penultimate para-
graph of this manifesto, Genet wrote: ‘I have come to that part of my speech where,
to help save the blacks, I am calling for crime, for the assassination of whites’ (p.
69). In its radical violence, such a phrase fl ies in the face of all Derrida’s political
positions, throughout his life. It may well be felt that the signatories – who included
Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras, Pierre Guyotat, and Philippe Sollers – read
and approved merely the appeal on behalf of Black prisoners, and not the contents
of Genet’s accompanying manifesto. At all events, thanks to Hadrien Laroche, the
author of the book Le Dernier Genet (Paris: Seuil, coll. ‘Fiction & Cie’, 1997), for
drawing my attention to this problem. It calls for a long analysis which I cannot
embark on here.