By placing Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) in counterpoint with Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), this essay aims to shed new light on Butler’s political and ethical writing, revealing, in particular, the ways in which a politics of cohabitation is inseparable from the process of translation. Both Butler and Said articulate the difficult yet necessary task of establishing a just cohabitation through the translation between two histories of exile, Jewish and Palestinian. Firstly, (...) I examine Butler’s efforts to derive a principle of cohabitation from the Jewish history of diaspora, arguing that it should be understood as a response to Said’s reflections on Jewishness in Freud and the Non-European. I then seek to illuminate how statelessness structures the interplay of text and image in After the Last Sky, arguing that exilic tension provides the framework for Said’s rethinking of comparativism. (shrink)