J. Butler theorizing migrant politics by linking Arendt and Said

Butler wrote the following for the London Review of Books, "I merely belong to them" (10 May 07):

Arendt could be said to have embraced a diasporic politics, centred not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless. To read her now is to be reminded of the passages in Edward Said’s book Freud and the Non-European where he suggests that Jews and Palestinians might find commonality in their shared history of exile and dispossession, and that diaspora could become the basis of a common polity in the Middle East. Said sees the basis of solidarity, in part, as the ‘irremediably diasporic, unhoused character of Jewish life’, which aligns it ‘in our age of vast population transfers’ with ‘refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants’. If Arendt sometimes argues for home and for belonging (though she does this less frequently over time), it is not to call for a polity built on those established ties of fealty. A polity requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging. This is the vanquishing of self-love – the movement away from narcissism and nationalism – which forms the basis for a just politics that would oppose both nationalism and those forms of state violence that reproduce statelessness and its sufferings.

More thoughtful analysis is regarding the "transfers" of refugees, exiles, expatriates, immigrants, and similar groups.