Abstract
Despite his incarceration in 1961 on a one-year-to-life sentence, George Jackson was a prolific Marxist theorist, with two books published. His autobiographical epistolary text Soledad Brother, published the year before his death in 1971, contains letters to family, friends, and supporters that are at once deeply personal and broadly theoretical. These letters consider and analyze the ways that he finds himself (re)captured and thus caught in the machinery of the US- American carceral apparatus. Jackson’s theory of revolutionary politics, linked to American and global struggles against imperialism, was of particular interest to Gilles Deleuze, whose conceptualization of the Line of Flight is furnished by a crucial quotation of Jackson’s: “I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick” (328). This quotation from Soledad Brother, with minor variations, winds through Deleuze’s collaborative oeuvre, from Anti-Oedipus with Felix Guattari to Dialogues II with Claire Parnet, and forms a key aspect of the notion of the line of flight, which has been further mobilized by recent scholars. Despite the importance of this quotation, it goes uncited throughout all of Deleuze’s work, in all editions, in multiple languages, in both print and digital mediums. There is no included bibliographic information and no editor’s note or translator’s note as to why this is the case. The reference is simply absent, with its most glaring absence in the bibliography of Anti-Oedipus. Using this absence as a point of departure this paper will consider Jackson, and by extension Black/Prisoner beings, as disavowed theoreticians, whose contributions cannot be considered. Further, I argue that this ‘leaving out’ is a critical aspect of both prisoner status and its linkage to Blackness, reflected in the ways that Jackson is bound to both (non)positions. In hope of maintaining the integrity of the absence in Anti-Oedipus, this paper will further interrogate the meaning of such an absence, and the parasitic relation of something to nothing and the uncitability of Black prisoner as theorist.