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| Workers waiting for work |
“The face is the ultimate vulnerability of the Other. Peace with the face of the Other is the beginning of justice.” – Emmanuel Levinas
This note begins with an image on a winter morning; when I saw migrant workers gathered at a street intersection in the bone-chilling cold. With cracked hands and sleepless eyes, I remember one of them who, when the turn for work passed to another, neither grew angry nor resentful—he simply disappeared! That scene stayed in my memory because it displayed something of imposed suffering and the very image of injustice. They are only seen when they work, and they only count when they are silent. As if being useful is the price of visibility, while speaking marks the boundary of erasure. These days, however, that innocent image blends in my mind with newer ones—images that show how merely being Afghan suffices for some people to imagine you as an enemy. It was precisely this combination of suffering and suspicion, this rift between being and being accepted, that became the pretext for writing these lines.
In times of identity and security crises, society is deeply prone to othering—the kind of Other who can easily be accused and turned into the focal point of public hatred. For years, the racial apparatus in Iran has represented Afghans—not on the basis of reality—as a problem: as a danger, a suspect, uncultured, and more recently as a spy! A subject placed in the position of a security threat so that, through it, power can reconstruct the very meaning of security. Their elimination becomes a way to simulate the return of stability—though only a performative one. This representation of Afghans as enemies serves another function for power as well: denying its systematic responsibility toward them.
Power classifies bodies. Some it deems worthy of protection, others worthy of elimination. The migrant’s body, within a disciplinary order—as Foucault described it—is a layered subject: useful yet rightless, consumable yet disrespected. A body that lives but does not have a life, visible but not heard. The racial order disperses them across the city: in workshops, on rooftops, in the backrooms of houses. But it does not allow them to be visible in public, intellectual, or political spaces. Afghan migrants are managed bodies: worn out from labor, silenced by pressure, and excluded from language. By keeping them in a semi-legal status, the state evades responsibility: no insurance, no education, no services—yet always at risk of arrest or deportation. Something akin to what Agamben called “bare life”: a form of existence that merely continues, without any place in the political world.
Meanwhile, the official media take over the project. At the peak of a crisis, it is time to stage the threatening face—and who better than the Afghan migrant? They are accused: of infiltration, of betrayal, of sabotage. And what makes these accusations believable is not reality, but a racial imagination already planted in society’s mind. It is as though, through this mechanism, the crisis is hidden behind racial walls.
Yet the problem is not only in media representation or security labels; a deeper issue is at play. A structural, deliberately permanent form of rightlessness. Even if born in Iran, the Afghan remains in the same suspended orbit. He is an actual worker and a potential threat. Because, on the one hand, if he is recognized, the dominant racial illusions collapse. On the other, if this cheap laborer, this silent worker, turns into a political subject, the existing balance of power and exploitative relations will be disrupted. He is kept outside the circle of participation so that he remains alien to any form of demands.
In the end, when we refuse to see the suffering of the Other, we in fact lose our own sensitivity and our capacity for ethics. As Levinas says: indifference to the Other wounds not only them, but us too—at a fundamental level! Perhaps that is why society can endure such vast rightlessness: because it is built on eyes that prefer not to see. A social order constructed through violence that controls bodies, founded upon silence, exclusion, and invisibility. Yet no order remains forever based on erasure. Somewhere, at some moment, at some corner of that intersection, a cracked hand rises again and a voice, however faint, begins to speak!