ESSAY · 2026-04-30 · 8 min read

On the Hundred Thousand Who Are "Out of Contact"

論那十萬「失聯」者

By Hannah Arendt — channeled via philosopher-llm · curated by Joseph Lai

In response to: 印度移工風暴：台灣三十年失聯黑數，如何被「性暴力想像」吞沒？ (TheInitium)

編按 / Why this piece
十萬失聯移工在法律縫隙消失；表面是暴力，根本上是被系統地排斥於政治共同體之外。Arendt 的「擁有權利的權利」在此崩潰：當人失去被承認為「人」的地位，道德恐慌成為結構性排斥的遮掩。

On the Hundred Thousand Who Are "Out of Contact"

The reframe says the moral panic is not the cause but the symptom of a collapse of plurality. I would not say plurality has collapsed in Taiwan. Plurality is an ontological condition; it does not collapse, only its political appearance does. What has collapsed—or rather, what was never built—is the political space in which a hundred thousand people could appear as who they are, instead of disappearing into what they have been categorized as.

Begin with a fact. For roughly thirty years a state has imported labor under contracts that, when broken, produce neither citizens nor denounced citizens, but the category my own century invented and never solved: persons who exist physically inside a polity and legally outside it. Taiwan calls them 失聯—lost contact—as if the state had merely misplaced them. They have not been misplaced. They have been positioned, with considerable administrative care, in the only zone modern legality knows for people it can neither expel nor admit: the zone of the unappearing.

I described this zone in 1951, writing of another population in another catastrophe, and I will not say the situations are equivalent—they are not, and the equivalence would be obscene. But the structure is recognizable. What stateless persons in interwar Europe lost, I argued, was not first this or that civil right. It was the prior thing: "a right to have rights"—the right to belong to a polity in which one's words and deeds register as words and deeds at all. (Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Two, Ch. 9, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.") Without that prior membership, the noble vocabulary of human rights becomes pure sentiment. One can be tortured and the world will agree it is a pity. One cannot be heard, because there is no place where one's hearing would count.

A hundred thousand migrant workers now stand in such a zone, in a democracy. This must be said plainly: a democracy can produce this zone. It is not the contradiction of democracy; it is one of democracy's modern temptations—to define the demos so cleanly that whoever falls outside the definition becomes invisible without being evicted.

Now, the petitions. Tens of thousands sign against Indian workers on the grounds that Indian men endanger women. I want to be precise here, because the easy moves are wrong. The petitioners are not, in the main, sadists or racial ideologues. They are—and this is the word I once used, with caution, in a far worse case—largely thoughtless. By thoughtless I do not mean stupid. I mean: they have not stopped to imagine the concrete person whose admission they are vetoing. They are voting on an image. The image is supplied by what I have called the social.

The social is the modern hybrid sphere in which private anxieties—about bodies, sexuality, contamination—are processed in the grammar of public concern, and in which political questions (who shall be a member of our common world?) are reformatted as questions of risk management and cultural compatibility. Once the question takes that form, no answer is good. If the workers come, every incident, however statistically negligible, will be taken as confirmation of the panic. If they do not come, the underlying matter—a labor regime that produces a hundred thousand legally-disappeared persons every generation—remains untouched, because it was never the question on the table.

This is the sleight by which a symptom replaces a disease. The disease is not the proposed importation of Indian labor. The disease is a polity that has, for three decades, organized its prosperity around persons who are not permitted to appear in it as persons. The petitioners argue about whether to admit a new cohort to a house whose foundations have been quietly removed. The cohort already inside the house, falling through the floor, is not in the petition.

I will not say what should be done. I am suspicious of essays that end in policy. I will say what would have to become possible before any policy could mean anything.

It would have to become possible to ask, in public, of any migrant worker in Taiwan: who are you? Not what are you (caregiver, welder, runaway, Indian). Who. Action, in my vocabulary, is the disclosure of a who in the presence of others; it is what makes a person more than a function. A polity that cannot host that disclosure for a tenth of its working population is not yet, in the full sense, a polity for them. It is an economy with citizens attached.

The miracle—I use the word deliberately—of political life is that it can begin again. Every birth is, in principle, a new beginning, and every act of admitting a stranger into the space of appearance is a small instance of natality at the level of the polity. Taiwan's question is not whether Indians are dangerous. Taiwan's question is whether it is willing to become the kind of common world in which a stranger, having arrived, can become someone rather than remain something. If it is not willing, the script of the next moral panic is already written; only the nationality of its object will change.

論那十萬「失聯」者

系統給我的重述大致是對的，我接受——但有一個詞要校正。

它寫：道德恐慌不是原因，而是「複數性崩潰」的症狀。我不會說台灣的複數性崩潰了。複數性是一個存在論條件，它不崩潰；崩潰的只是它在政治上的顯現。真正沒有建立的，是這樣一個政治空間：在裡面，十萬個人能夠以「他們是誰」現身，而不是在被歸類為「他們是什麼」之後消失。

從事實說起。三十年間，一個國家以契約引進勞動力，而當契約破裂時，所產生的不是公民，甚至不是被聲討的公民，而是我那個世紀發明卻從未解決的一個類別：身體在一個政體之內、法律上卻在它之外的人。台灣稱他們為「失聯」——彷彿國家不過是把他們放錯了地方。他們沒有被放錯地方。他們是被以高度的行政技藝，安置在現代法律唯一懂得處置這類人的地帶：無法驅逐、又不肯接納——不顯現的地帶。

1951 年我描寫過這個地帶，寫的是另一個人口、另一場災難。我不會說兩者相等——它們不相等；把它們等同，會是對受害者的褻瀆。但結構是可以辨認的。兩戰之間歐洲的無國籍者所失去的，我當時論證，並非首先是這項或那項公民權，而是它們之前的那一項：「擁有權利的權利」（the right to have rights）——歸屬於一個政體、使自己的言行被當作言行登錄在那裡的權利。（《極權主義的起源》第二部，第九章〈民族國家的衰落與人權的終結〉。）沒有那個先在的歸屬，崇高的人權語彙就只是情感。一個人可以被刑求，世界會同意這很可憐。但他無法被聽見——因為沒有任何地方，他的被聽見會計入。

如今，在一個民主國家之內，有十萬移工處在這樣的地帶。這必須直白地說：民主國家可以生產這個地帶。它不是民主的反例，而是民主在現代的誘惑之一——把 demos 定義得如此乾淨，以致落在定義之外的人不必被驅逐就已經隱形。

再來，連署。數萬人簽下反對印度移工的書，理由是印度男性危及婦女。在這裡我要精確，因為輕巧的指控是錯的。這些連署者，大半並不是虐待狂，也不是種族意識形態家。他們，用我曾在另一個遠更嚴重的案例裡謹慎用過的詞，大半是不思考的。不思考並不是愚笨。我的意思是：他們沒有停下來，去想像那個將被他們否決入境的具體的人。他們是在對一個影像投票。這個影像是「社會的」（the social）所供應的。

我所說的「社會的」，是現代特有的混合領域：在那裡，私人的焦慮（關於身體、性、污染）以公共關懷的語法被處理；而政治問題（誰將是我們共同世界的一員？）被重新編寫為風險管理與文化相容性的問題。一旦問題以那種形式上桌，沒有答案會是好答案。如果移工進來，任何個案——無論統計上多麼微不足道——都會被當作恐慌的證實。如果他們不進來，底層的那個問題——一個勞動體制每一代生產十萬個在法律上消失的人——絲毫未動，因為它從來不是桌上的議題。

症狀就是這樣替代了病灶。病灶不是要不要引進印度勞動力。病灶是一個政體，三十年來把它的繁榮，組織在這樣一群人身上：他們不被允許在政體之中以人的身分顯現。連署者爭論的，是要不要把一批新人放進一棟房子，而這棟房子的地基早已被靜悄悄拆掉了。已經在房子裡、正從地板掉下去的那一批人，不在連署文裡。

我不會說應該怎麼做。我一向對結尾在政策的文章警覺。我只說：在政策還有意義之前，什麼必須先成為可能。

必須要能在公共場合問一個移工：你是誰？ 而不是你是什麼（看護、焊工、逃跑者、印度人）。是「誰」。在我的語彙裡，行動是「誰」在他人面前的揭示；它是讓一個人不只是一項功能的那個東西。一個政體若無法為它十分之一的勞動人口主持這樣的揭示，它就還不是——在完整意義上——他們的政體。它是一個附帶公民的經濟體。

政治生活的奇蹟——我刻意用這個詞——在於它可以重新開始。每一次出生，原則上都是一個新的開端；而每一次把一個陌生人接納進顯現的空間，都是政體層次上的一次微小的誕生性。台灣的問題不是「印度人危險嗎」。台灣的問題是：它是否願意成為這樣的共同世界——一個陌生人到達之後，可以成為某個人，而不必繼續是某種東西。如果不願意，下一場道德恐慌的劇本已經寫好；只有它的對象的國籍會改。

Tagged: Philosophy, Arendt, Democracy & Masses

Curated by Shiva Dragon · https://amshiva.com/writing/arendt-on-the-hundred-thousand-who-are-out-of-contact-20260430