2.3. Ghosts of Empire

Hack: October 2025, Kuwait, Courtroom

In a Kuwaiti courtroom, a verdict is announced. In the dock sits a Filipina domestic worker accused of killing her employer's child. The details that emerge during the investigation horrify even seasoned journalists: the victim's body, according to the prosecution, was placed in a washing machine. Motives? Circumstances? Degree of guilt? Human rights advocates attempt to obtain any information but encounter a wall of silence.
The most horrifying aspect of this story is not the details of a crime that may not even have occurred. The most horrifying aspect is the silence of the Philippine embassy in Kuwait. Automated responses to inquiries. Silence where a voice of defence should be. Emptiness where the state should be.
A woman whose remittances fed her family and sustained her homeland's economy ceases to exist for that state at the moment of mortal danger. She exists as long as she pays. She does not exist when protection is needed. The migrant's body, yesterday a source of foreign currency earnings, today becomes the object of a monstrous metaphor — it is "processed" like waste material. The washing machine here is not merely an instrument of murder but a symbol of the disposal of spent resources.

Alienation

For the philosophical understanding of these scenes, it is necessary to turn to a category that underwent a complex evolution in the history of thought before acquiring its contemporary configuration — the category of alienation.
Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, introduced the concept of Entäußerung (externalisation) as a necessary moment in the movement of spirit. Spirit must externalise itself, become other, in order through this externalisation to arrive at self-knowledge. Alienation here is not a pathology but a constitutive moment of development, the condition of possibility of a return to self on a higher level (Hegel, 1977). The slave, alienating his labour to the master, arrives through this alienation at a self-consciousness inaccessible to the idle master.
Feuerbach transferred this category into an anthropological and critical register. In The Essence of Christianity, he shows that religion is the alienation of human essence: man projects his best qualities onto an imaginary heavenly being, while he himself remains impoverished, emptied. Alienation here is no longer a moment of development but a pathology requiring overcoming through the return to man of his own essence (Feuerbach, 1957).
Marx, drawing on Feuerbach but overcoming his anthropologism, developed a theory of the alienation of labour that became fundamental for all subsequent critical theory. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he distinguishes four forms of alienation: alienation from the product of labour (the created thing confronts the worker as an alien force), alienation from the labour process (activity becomes forced, external), alienation from species-being (man ceases to be a free, conscious being), and alienation from other human beings (competition, hostility) (Marx, 1956).
These four levels of alienation in Marx describe the situation of the industrial worker under early capitalism. The worker sells his labour power but remains a bearer of rights — legal, political, human. Exploitation does not abolish subjectivity; it merely deforms it.
Filipino migrants demonstrate a different, deeper form of alienation — one that can be called a fourth level, not anticipated by Marx's schema. This is alienation not only from the product and process of labour, not only from species-being and other human beings, but alienation from the very possibility of having rights, alienation from subjectivity as such. The human being ceases even to be "labour power" — he becomes an "export commodity," a statistical unit sustaining the GDP of the metropolis, but lacking voice and protection.
The conceptual apparatus developed by Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer project allows us to grasp the specificity of this fourth level of alienation. Agamben, drawing on the Aristotelian distinction between bare life, the simple fact of existence, and politically qualified life, life in community, shows how sovereign power produces "bare life" — life excluded from the political order but precisely through this exclusion included within it (Agamben, 1998).
The paradigm of such "bare life" for Agamben is the figure of homo sacer from archaic Roman law — a person who may be killed but not sacrificed. His life is stripped of all value — both sacred and legal. He is situated in a zone of indistinction between law and lawlessness, between the human and the inhuman.
The Filipina domestic worker in a Kuwaiti courtroom, workers deported without charges, migrants proposed for disembarkation in Libya as unwanted cargo — all find themselves in the position of homo sacer. Their life is protected neither by the law of the host country nor by the law of the country of origin. They may be deported, imprisoned, killed — and this will not arouse the same resonance as the death of a "full" citizen.
Agamben's "state of exception" ceases to be a temporary emergency measure and becomes a permanent mode of existence for entire categories of people. The migrant is one who is included in the economic order (his labour is needed, his money is awaited at home) but excluded from the political order. He is pure labour power, stripped of political body.
It is revealing that the Philippine state itself, as the anthropologist Vicente Rafael notes, contributes to the production of this "bare life." Since 1974, under Marcos Sr., a system of state encouragement of labour migration was created — as a temporary measure to relieve social tension and obtain foreign currency (Rafael, 2000). Half a century later, this "temporary measure" has become a permanent structure. The state institutionalised the export of people, creating an entire Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), but did not create mechanisms for their real protection.
The migrant finds himself in a paradoxical position: he is needed by the state as a source of income but not needed as a subject of rights. His existence for the state is purely economic, not political. He is a currency generator, not a citizen.

Spectral Presence

Vicente Rafael introduces the concept of "spectral presence" to describe this phenomenon. Filipino migrants, he writes, "hover at the boundaries of national consciousness, making those boundaries porous by virtue of their dollar-bearing movements. In this sense, they take the form of spectral presences, whose labour takes place elsewhere, but whose effects, thanks to their link to money, secure a place in the nation-state" (Rafael, 2000: 206).
Spectral presence is a mode of existence in which the subject both is and is not simultaneously. He is economically present — his money works, his remittances change families' lives, houses are built with his funds. But he is politically absent — he has no voice, no protection, no right to a fair trial. He is present as a ghost, as an absent presence, as a pure function without a subject.
This spectrality also has a reverse side. John Berger, in the classic study A Seventh Man, devoted to migrant labour in Europe in the 1970s, wrote: "The migrant does not belong where he works, and no longer belongs where he came from" (Berger & Mohr, 1975). The rupture is double: rupture with the place of origin (which ceases to be "home" in the full sense) and the inability to take root in the place of arrival (which always remains "alien").
Daniel Swain, analysing Berger's concept in the context of Marxist migration theory, shows that this double non-belonging produces a specific form of fragmentation of the subject: "the fragmentation of the worker into a bundle of capacities and needs which both underpins and is intensified by this inequality" (Swain, 2022: 162). The migrant does not exist as an integral personality; he exists as a set of functions, as labour power alienated from its bearer.
The Filipina domestic worker in Kuwait exists as labour power as long as she works. As soon as she ceases to work (because arrested, because accused), she ceases to exist — for the embassy, for the state, for the system. Her functional existence has ended; a spectral existence begins — neither here nor there, belonging to no one.
The phenomenological tradition, from Husserl to Waldenfels, developed a conceptual apparatus allowing the description of the structure of the experience of the "alien." For our purposes, the distinction between the "other" (alter) and the "alien" (fremd) that Waldenfels draws in his responsive phenomenology is important.
Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, shows that the experience of the alien is the experience of the "accessibility of the inaccessible." The other is manifested to me in a peculiar way — in appresentation, in an indication of what cannot in principle be given directly (Husserl, 1960). This is not a defect of knowledge but a constitutive structure: the other always preserves his otherness, always escapes full grasping.
Levinas radicalises this intuition, placing the relation with the Other in the ethical dimension. The Other for Levinas is always "alien," always beyond totality, always demanding infinite responsibility that cannot be incorporated into any economy of exchange (Levinas, 1969). The ethical relation is asymmetrical: I owe everything to the Other, the Other owes me nothing.
Waldenfels, developing this line, introduces the concept of responsive rationality. The experience of the alien, for Waldenfels, cannot be described in terms of intentionality (the relation of "own" to "alien") but requires a different structure — the structure of "claim" and "response." The alien makes a claim on me, demands a response, and this response must be an event that ruptures the existing order of meaning.
The Filipino migrants in the scenes described find themselves in a situation where the "response" has not occurred. The embassy responds with an auto-reply — not a response but a simulacrum of a response. The judicial system does not grant the right to defence. The state called upon to protect turns away. The alien's claim remains unanswered, and this silence is not merely an absence of reaction but an active production of non-recognition, non-response, non-relation.
Here we encounter what can be called phenomenological privatisation. The response to the claim of the alien is the recognition of his existence, his right to a response, his inclusion in the common space of meaning. When there is no response, when the claim meets a wall of automated replies, the alien ceases even to be "alien" — he becomes nothing, pure absence, a ghost.

The Export of People and the Paradox of State Sovereignty

The Filipino case exposes a paradox of state sovereignty under global capitalism. The state, which by definition should protect its citizens, turns out to be interested in their absence — and in their vulnerability.
The figures Rafael cites are striking: in the mid-1990s, annual remittances from Filipino migrants amounted to about $6 billion — more than foreign aid and direct investment (Rafael, 2000: 206). Today, this figure has grown to $38 billion. The Philippine economy is sustained by the earnings of those the state cannot protect.
President Marcos Jr. says he dreams of making work abroad "a choice, not a necessity." Yet simultaneously, his administration has created the Department of Migrant Workers and continues his father's policy — the export of people as a national project. The dream remains rhetoric; the reality remains export.
Here a paradoxical structure arises, which can be described in terms of biopolitics: the state governs the lives of its citizens, but this governance takes the form of encouraging their absence. Citizens are needed by the state as a source of income but not needed as physically present bodies. Their life is valuable insofar as it produces currency; their death, their suffering, their powerlessness are merely production costs that the state prefers not to notice.
Agamben's thesis that sovereignty produces "bare life" through exclusion here receives new confirmation. Filipino migrants are bare life in its pure form: their labour is exploited, their rights are unprotected, their life is worth nothing. But the paradox is that this exclusion is produced not only by the host states but also by the state of origin. The Philippines encourages its citizens to become "bare life" for others — because this bare life brings money.
Marx's theory of alienation described a situation in which the human being remains a human being — albeit crippled, albeit exploited, albeit alienated from his essence. The four levels of alienation he distinguishes presuppose that there is something to alienate — there is a subject, there is a species-being, there are other human beings from whom one can be alienated.
Filipino migrants demonstrate a different situation. Here the issue is not alienation from something that remains as a potentiality, but a constitutive exclusion from the very possibility of possessing subjectivity. The human being ceases even to be a slave, even an exploited worker, even a bearer of rights that are trampled. He becomes a ghost — a being whose reality is recognised by no one, including the state that should be his last defence.
John Berger, at the end of A Seventh Man, writes: "The migrant is not someone who belongs to a different class, but someone who belongs to a different time" (Berger & Mohr, 1975). This time is a pure present without past or future, the time of functional existence, a time in which there is no place for memory or hope.
The Filipina domestic worker in a Kuwaiti prison, workers deported without trial, the millions whose money feeds the economy but whose voices are unheard — all live in this other time. Their past (the village, the family, the culture) remains somewhere out there, in a place they left and which can no longer be home. Their future is uncertain: tomorrow they may be deported, imprisoned, killed. There is only today — today's labour, today's remittance, today's survival.
And the question this situation poses to us is this: is a politics for ghosts possible? Is there a way to restore subjectivity to those who are excluded from it constitutively, not temporarily? Or are we facing a new form of existence — a form in which the human being ceases to be human, without becoming animal, machine, or slave, but something entirely different, for which we do not yet have a name?
The Filipino case exposes a structure that requires moving beyond the Marxist theory of alienation and Agamben's concept of bare life. This is the structure of a permanent conflict between presence and absence, between function and subjectivity, between economic value and political non-being.
The fourth level of alienation we observe here is nothing other than a radicalisation of this tension to the point where one of the poles (subjectivity) almost completely disappears. The migrant is included in the Taxis of global capital — his labour is accounted for, his money flows through banking channels, his presence is recorded in databases. But his own subjectivity, his right to a voice, his capacity to make demands — all of this passes into Hysis, into the region of the invisible, the unaccounted, the non-existent for the system.
The Filipina domestic worker in a Kuwaiti prison, awaiting her verdict in complete solitude — an image that will remain in the history of philosophy as a reminder that alienation can go further than the classics supposed. Not only from the product of labour, not only from the labour process, not only from species-being and other human beings, but from the very possibility of being a subject. And the question this image poses to us is this: what remains of the human being when alienation reaches this fourth level? And can he be brought back from there?