In 1943, Hannah Arendt speaks, with a poignant and sarcastic text, about the situation of the Jewish refugee, this new kind of person "who is locked up in concentration camps by his enemies and in internment camps by his friends".

Fifty years later, and after a new wave of refugees has just begun to cross European borders, Agamben comments on Arendt's text, simultaneously noting the gaps in contemporary phantasmagorical rhetoric about human rights.

At the beginning of the next century, Enzo Traverso examines the advantage that an "interpretation of distance" offers to exiled intellectuals, even identifying similarities and differences (and the missed opportunity of a meeting) between the Jewish and black diaspora.

This book brings together these three texts, at a time when an increasingly larger part of humanity is becoming a refugee, deprived of every right - and while the political positioning towards the problem of migration becomes a decisive dividing line.