ESSAY · 2026-04-27 · 7 min read

When Dying Stays in the Household

當死亡留在家戶之內

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

In response to: 她們的墓地：宏福苑大火後，尋訪印尼家務工的遺屬 (TheInitium)

編按 / Why this piece
Arendt 的診斷：家務工困於家（oikos）的勞動，死亡無法升入公共領域成為政治事件。可見性就是權力，決定誰被悼念、誰被遺忘。

When Dying Stays in the Household ## 當死亡留在家戶之內

A fire in Tai Po. Among the dead, several Indonesian women employed in the homes of Hong Kong families. Their bodies travel back to villages on Java and Lombok; their funerals are held there, witnessed by mothers and children who had waited years between visits. The grief is enormous and entirely private. The death of each woman registers, in the place where she earned her wages, as a line in a casualty figure; it registers, in the place where she was loved, as the end of a world.

This division is not new. It is, in fact, the oldest political distinction we have inherited. The Greeks called the household oikos and the public realm polis, and they understood — clearly, if also brutally — that those who were absorbed in the labor of keeping bodies alive (women, slaves, foreigners) could not appear in the polis as actors. To labor was to be confined to necessity. To act was to step into a space where one could be seen and heard by equals, where one's words and deeds could leave a story behind.

We have, of course, formally abolished the categories of slave and barbarian. What we have not abolished is the structure. There remain persons whose entire working lives are absorbed in keeping other people's households running, and whose existence — including their dying — does not cross the threshold into the common world. The Indonesian domestic worker in Hong Kong cooks, cleans, raises children not her own, and sleeps in a corner of a flat that is not hers. She is hyper-visible inside the household and invisible outside it. When she dies in a fire, the fire is a public event; she is not.

I want to put the question precisely, because it is easily sentimentalized and therefore easily evaded. The question is not whether these women's lives "mattered" — that is a moral question, and the moral answer is trivial. The question is political: whose dying constitutes a public event, and on what grounds? An event is public when it enters a space of appearance — when it is witnessed, narrated, contested, mourned by strangers as well as by kin, and inscribed in the durable memory of a common world. Most deaths are not public in this sense. They belong to oikos. What is striking about the deaths of migrant domestic workers is the asymmetry: the fire that killed them is a public event in the city where they worked, but they themselves are routed back into private grief — a grief that occurs, geographically and politically, somewhere else.

Here I would invoke a phrase I have used before, in a different but not unrelated context. I once wrote that the calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. The migrant domestic worker is not stateless; she has a passport, a village, a family. But in the city where she labors and dies, she is not, in any politically meaningful sense, a member of the polity. She holds a contract, not a public existence. Her plurality — the elementary human fact of being one among others, capable of appearing and acting — is suspended for the duration of her labor, and resumes only when her body is sent home.

One could call this exploitation, and it is. But to call it only exploitation is to miss what is specifically political about it. Exploitation is an economic category; the loss I am describing is the loss of the capacity to appear. The two overlap but are not the same. A well-paid domestic worker — were such a thing common — would still be confined to oikos; the wage does not by itself produce a public existence.

So: whose dying enters the common world? In our time, the answer corresponds rather precisely to: whose living was permitted to enter it. Those whose labor was confined to private households die privately, even when they die together, even when they die in a fire the city watches. This is not a failure of compassion on the part of the watching city. Compassion is an emotion proper to oikos; it does not by itself open the polis. The question — and I will leave it as a question, because it is a real one and I do not pretend to hold the answer — is whether a political community can recognize as its own the dying of those whose living it had not recognized as its own. If it can, by what act? If it cannot, what is it that we are calling a political community?

大埔的一場火。死者之中，幾位在香港人家中受僱的印尼婦女。她們的遺體運回爪哇與龍目的村莊；葬禮在那裡舉行，由多年難得相見的母親與子女送別。哀痛是巨大的，並且完全是私人的。每一位婦女的死亡——在她賺取工資的城市，是傷亡數字裡的一筆；在她被愛著的地方，是一個世界的終結。

這個分隔並不新鮮。它其實是我們所繼承的、最古老的政治區分。希臘人稱家戶為 oikos，稱公共領域為 polis；他們清楚地、儘管也殘酷地理解到：凡是被「維持身體存活」之勞動所吞沒的人——婦女、奴隸、外邦人——皆不能以行動者的身分出現於 polis 之中。勞動，意味著被困於必然性。行動，則意味著踏入一個能被同儕看見與聽見的空間，一個自己的言行得以留下故事的空間。

我們當然在形式上廢除了奴隸與蠻族這類範疇。我們未曾廢除的，是其結構。仍有一些人，整段勞動生涯都被吸納於維持他人家戶的運轉，而他們的存在——包括他們的死亡——不曾跨越門檻、進入共同世界。在香港的印尼家務工煮飯、打掃、撫養並非自己所生的孩子，並睡在一間不屬於她的公寓的一角。她在家戶之內被過度看見，在家戶之外則不被看見。當她死於火災，火災是公共事件；她不是。

我想把這個問題說得精確一點，因為它極易被感傷化，因而極易被迴避。問題不在於這些婦女的生命「是否有價值」——那是道德問題，而道德的回答是無甚意義的。問題是政治的：誰的死亡構成一樁公共事件？依據什麼？一個事件之為公共事件，是因為它進入了一個顯現空間 (space of appearance)——因為它被陌生人與親人共同見證、敘述、爭論、悼念，並被刻入一個共同世界的持久記憶之中。多數死亡並非在此意義上的公共。它們屬於 oikos。而移工女性之死所凸顯的，是不對稱：殺死她們的火災，在她們勞動的城市是公共事件；她們本人，卻被遣送回私人的哀悼——一場在地理上與政治上都發生於別處的哀悼。

我想在此援引一句我曾在另一個語境中寫下的話。我曾寫道：無權者的災難，不在於他們被剝奪了生命、自由與追求幸福之權，而在於他們不再隸屬於任何共同體。移工家務工並非無國籍；她有護照，有村莊，有家人。但在她勞動並死去的那座城市裡，她在任何具政治意義的層次上，都不是政治體的成員。她擁有的是一紙合約，不是一個公共的存在。她的複數性——亦即作為眾人之一而能顯現、能行動這個最基本的人類事實——在她勞動的整段期間被懸置，直到她的遺體被送回。

人們可以稱此為剝削，它也確實是。但若僅以剝削稱之，便錯失了其中特殊的政治面向。剝削是經濟範疇；我所描述的喪失，是顯現能力的喪失。兩者重疊，但不相同。即使有一位待遇優渥的家務工——假設這種情形普遍——她依然受困於 oikos；工資本身並不生產出公共存在。

那麼：誰的死亡進入共同世界？在我們的時代，答案相當精確地對應於：誰的「生」曾被允許進入這個世界。凡是勞動被局限於私人家戶之人，死也將私人地死，即使他們一同死去，即使他們死於一場全城共睹的大火。這並非觀看著的城市之不近人情。憐憫是 oikos 之情；它本身並不開啟 polis。問題是——我將之留作問題，因為它是真實的問題，而我並不假裝持有答案——一個政治共同體，能否承認那些它從未承認其「生」為己有之人的「死」為己有？若能，藉由何種行動？若不能，那麼我們所謂的政治共同體，究竟是什麼？

Tagged: Philosophy, Arendt, Democracy & Masses

Curated by Shiva Dragon · https://amshiva.com/writing/arendt-當死亡留在家戶之內-20260427