'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'. (1) It's Derrida. He is writing a letter to Jean Genet. The letter is dated August 20 1971. (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 rightness of Jackson's fight, and he had already signed the statement of support for Jackson that Genet had drafted, 'Appel pour un comite de soutien aux militants politiques noirs emprisonnes'. 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 Genet's appeal was supposed to counter in the first place. Would Jackson not be kept in a position of submission if Genet and Derrida stepped out in the French public sphere to talk about Jackson as an African-American victim of state racism in the United States? It was not because Derrida did not agree with Genet that Jackson's case was an outrage; but because Derrida was afraid that if he spoke out for Jackson within the framework of Genet's appeal, he would reproduce the very structure of submission the appeal was meant to critique. Yes of course, but ... Genet was well aware of the problems of commitment himself. As he said in his 'May Day Speech' at Yale University in 1970: 'But a symbolic gesture or set of gestures is idealistic in the sense that it satisfies those who make it or who adopt the symbol, and prevents them from carrying out real acts that have an irreversible power. I think we can say that a symbolic attitude is both the good conscience of the liberal and a situation that makes it possible to believe that every effort has been made for the revolution. It is much better to carry out real acts on a seemingly small scale than to indulge in vain and theatrical manifestations. We should never forget this when we know that the Black Panther Party seems to be armed, and armed with real weapons'. (3) Well aware of the risks of commitment, Genet nonetheless tried with great strength and enormous energy to put his pen at the service of political groups like the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and causes such as immigration. Genet's political engagement began in May '68 when he defended Daniel Cohn-Bendit from anti-semitic slurs in L'Humanite, the Communist Party's daily.4 Following that event Genet got into contact with the Black Panthers and started collaborating with them, including writing the preface for Jackson's book, Soledad Brothers. Genet considered Jackson to be a black revolutionary as well as a poet. To Genet Jackson was a perfect example of the direct connection between art and revolution, the fact 'that a poetic emotion lies at the origin of revolutionary thought'. (5) As he phrased it in the introduction to Jackson's letters: '[F]rom the first letter to the last, nothing was willed, written, or composed for the purpose of putting together a book; and yet here is a book, hard and sure, and, I repeat, both a weapon in a struggle for liberation and a love poem. …