The room is dark, and only a little light enters through the windows. A man stands in the middle of it. He is a dictator, and the fear that has taken hold of him is visible now in a way that the authority of his position has perhaps never allowed anyone to see. Outside, voices are rising. Then the glass begins to break, and through the broken windows the lights of the surrounding grounds enter the room, so that the darkness is no longer complete. He can see the pieces of glass scattered across the floor and, beyond them, the movement of people he can no longer fully control.

Bullets are fired toward him. He remains standing as they reach his body and tear pieces of it away. Flesh falls from him, blood spreads across the floor, and what first appears to be nothing more than the destruction of a body begins to take another form: the fragments of his flesh begin to grow into bodies of their own. Each fragment becomes a separate body, and each body turns toward the small portion of the original body that remains in the middle of the room. They move toward it, attack it, and gradually consume it until almost nothing of the first body remains.

What had been a single political and biological body has not simply been killed. It has been divided, reproduced, and consumed by bodies that have emerged from it. The new bodies eventually leave the room, carrying with them something that cannot be reduced either to the body from which they came or to the violence through which they came into being.

The scene is difficult to place because its violence does not produce a simple opposition between one body and another. The bodies that destroy the dictator are not external to him in the ordinary sense. They emerge from his own body, become independent of it, and then turn against what remains. The problem is therefore not simply what happens when a ruler is overthrown. It is what happens when a political body becomes unable to remain identical with the bodies through which it has governed, organized, disciplined, and maintained itself. A political body may produce forms of embodiment that it cannot subsequently contain, and the treatment of other bodies may alter the body that claims the authority to treat them.

This question continues the movement of the previous essays without requiring their concepts to be rebuilt. The first essay approached the body as something whose capacities emerge through encounters, pressures, relations, histories, institutions, and material conditions. The second followed that movement beyond biological presence, asking how embodied existence can remain operative after the living body is gone, through memory, law, testimony, material arrangements, technology, and other forms of sedimentation. The problem now changes. If a body is formed within the conditions it encounters, and if what it does can become part of the conditions encountered by bodies that come later, what happens when a political body claims the authority to diagnose those conditions and to intervene in them?

The difficulty first appears at the level of understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of hermeneutical experience is useful here because it refuses the fantasy of an interpreter who begins from nowhere. Understanding comes with history, language, expectation, and inherited distinctions. Prejudice, in Gadamer’s sense, is not simply an error that can be removed before genuine understanding begins. Even the suspicion that prejudice is an obstacle belongs to a prior understanding of what prejudice is. Experience (Erfahrung) matters because an encounter can resist the expectations through which it was initially approached and thereby alter the understanding from which the encounter began. Understanding is open because what it encounters can change it.

This is continuous with the embodied understanding developed earlier in the project. A body does not first possess a complete interpretation and then enter the world. It understands from somewhere, through a body already shaped by previous encounters and still exposed to further ones. Language is part of this movement, but understanding cannot be reduced to language. What a body encounters can change not only what it says but what it is capable of noticing, enduring, expecting, and doing. The body is therefore not merely the object of understanding. It is one of the conditions through which understanding occurs.

Political diagnosis introduces something that Gadamer’s account alone does not settle. Interpretation changes character when it acquires authority over the body it interprets. A misunderstanding between individuals can be consequential, but a political institution can transform its interpretation into a classification and its classification into an intervention. A body may be designated dangerous, deviant, criminal, foreign, incapable, threatening, protected, or in need of correction. Once such a judgment acquires institutional or legal force, it can alter the possibilities available to that body: its movement, recognition, exposure to coercion, access to protection, vulnerability to punishment, and capacity to appear before an institution as a claimant, witness, or responsible subject.

The issue, then, is no longer only that understanding is situated and revisable. Some situated understandings possess the authority to organize the field in which later experience occurs. Political understanding can become intervention, and intervention can become part of the history that later understanding must interpret. The diagnostician does not simply describe a condition already there. Through the authority of diagnosis, he may participate in producing the condition he will later encounter.

This is where al-Fārābī becomes indispensable, but also where historical precision matters most. The text I draw upon is Fuṣūl Muntazaʿa (Selected Aphorisms), and what matters here is not the claim that al-Fārābī somehow anticipated the contemporary argument developed in this essay. He did not formulate a theory of embodied political diagnosis, legal sedimentation, or the self-referentiality of political treatment in the terms used here. What his text gives us is something more exact and, for that reason, more valuable: an account of political rule through the analogy of medicine, together with a conception of political health, disorder, treatment, and the ordering of human capacities. The contemporary argument begins by reconstructing what becomes possible when this architecture is placed in relation to the problem of an embodied political agent. In the fifth chapter, al-Fārābī writes:

The art of politics is like the art of medicine, because just as the physician needs to know the bodies and their parts, the conditions that occur in them, and the diseases that occur in them, and the causes of those diseases, and the degree of each disease, and the treatment by which each disease is removed, and the habits by which health is preserved and maintained, so too the politician needs to know the souls and their parts, the conditions that occur in them, the diseases that occur in them, the causes of those diseases, the degree of each disease, and the treatment by which each disease is removed, and the habits by which health is preserved and maintained. And just as the physician’s knowledge of these things is different according to the different bodies and their parts, and according to the different diseases and their causes and degrees and treatments and habits, so too the politician’s knowledge of these things is different according to the different souls and their parts, and according to the different diseases and their causes and degrees and treatments and habits. And just as the physician needs, in addition to knowing these things, to know the times and circumstances in which each treatment is to be applied, so too the politician needs to know the times and circumstances in which each treatment is to be applied.

The analogy is more demanding than the simple claim that both medicine and politics are forms of practical knowledge. Political knowledge requires knowledge of conditions, causes, degrees, treatments, habits, and circumstances. The politician therefore acts upon a field whose particularity must be understood before it can be ordered. But the analogy also leaves a question that al-Fārābī does not formulate in these terms. The physician encounters a body as the object of medical knowledge; the politician governs a city whose practices and relations also constitute the environment in which political knowledge is exercised. Once the political body is understood as embodied and historical, the political agent cannot stand in exactly the same relation to it as a physician to an externalized medical object. This is not a doctrine to be attributed to al-Fārābī. It is the point at which his analogy can be reconstructed into a contemporary problem. The forty-first chapter intensifies that problem by connecting psychic disease with distorted perception:

When a disease occurs in the soul, it changes the perception of the person who possesses it, so that he imagines a form harmonious with the body to be disharmonious, and a form disharmonious with the body to be harmonious. Therefore the person who possesses a diseased soul imagines evil to be good and good to be evil, and he imagines what is ugly to be beautiful and what is beautiful to be ugly. Thus the wicked person does not know that he is wicked, just as the sick person does not know that he is sick. Rather, he imagines that he is sound, just as the sick person may imagine that he is sound. And because the wicked person imagines that what he does is good, he does not seek to remove the disease from himself. The clever and deceitful wicked person is in an even more difficult condition, because he may possess an apparent knowledge of what is good while his soul is diseased, and therefore he can employ his cleverness in the service of his disease.

The point is not to make this passage into a modern theory of ideology or political psychology. Its significance for the present argument is narrower. Al-Fārābī recognizes that a condition of disease can affect the very perception through which that condition would be recognized. The possibility of correction therefore depends upon an ability to distinguish soundness from distortion, while the condition requiring correction may itself interfere with that distinction. The third chapter places this logic explicitly within political rule:

Health is a condition of the body that arises from moderation in the parts of the body and in their relations to one another, and disease is a condition that arises from deviation from this moderation. Just as the physician restores the body to moderation and removes from it what has caused the deviation, so the ruler restores the city to moderation and removes from it what has caused its deviation. The physician deals with the bodies of human beings, while the ruler deals with their souls and their practices. Therefore, the ruler is nobler in his art than the physician, because the physician seeks the health of bodies, whereas the ruler seeks the health of the souls and the city.

Again, the historical claim is precise: al-Fārābī understands political rule through an analogy with medicine and assigns political rule the task of restoring the city to an appropriate condition of moderation. The contemporary question begins elsewhere. If the city is not a passive object but a historical field of embodied relations, then restoring it cannot be an intervention that leaves the field untouched. Treatment becomes one of the forces through which the political body acquires its subsequent form. The fourth chapter makes the political specificity of the analogy clearer:

The physician, when he heals the bodily capacity, does not consider whether that capacity will be used for good or for evil, but only considers the capacity itself and seeks to restore it to health. The politician, however, must determine where and how the capacities of the citizens ought to be used, and toward what end they ought to be directed. For this reason, the politician is like the architect who determines the places in which the crafts are to be established and orders them toward the whole, and like the employer of the plasterers who supervises their work and directs it toward the completion of the house. Thus, the politician does not merely restore capacities but orders their use within the whole of the city.

This is the point at which political medicine becomes a problem of authority. The politician does not merely restore a capacity but determines its proper use within an ordered whole. Political rule therefore requires judgments about what constitutes proper use, proper order, and the health of the city. Al-Fārābī gives us this architecture; he does not give us the later critique of its internal position. That critique must be made by asking what happens when the political agent who orders the whole is himself one of the embodied formations produced within that whole.

The question changes further when political diagnosis becomes legal. Law is one of the principal ways through which judgments about order and disorder become durable. It classifies bodies and actions, establishes forms of recognition, distributes protection and exposure, defines conditions of coercion, and gives institutional force to distinctions between permissible and impermissible conduct. A legal category is therefore not merely a description attached to an already complete body. It can alter what a body is able to do within the institutional world.

This is why the language of diagnosis matters to philosophy of law. To declare a body dangerous is not simply to describe danger; it can authorize surveillance or confinement. To declare an action criminal is not simply to record its character; it can subject a body to punishment whose consequences extend into its future. To declare someone foreign, incapable, protected, or threatening places that body within a different field of rights, duties, vulnerabilities, and institutional responses. Legal judgment thus participates in the organization of embodied possibility.

But the law’s intervention does not end when the judgment has been applied. It leaves conditions behind. A punishment changes a person’s relation to institutions and to other people. A border creates patterns of movement and exclusion that later become facts for further legal regulation. A surveillance system changes the behavior it observes and can then treat that altered behavior as evidence supporting continued surveillance. An emergency measure can become part of the institutional environment through which a later emergency is recognized. What begins as a response to a condition can become one of the conditions to which law subsequently responds.

This is a stronger claim than saying that law exercises power. It concerns the temporality of legal intervention. Law acts upon bodies that have histories, but its action also enters those histories. The legal order therefore encounters, in the future, bodies and institutions partly transformed by its own earlier judgments. Its past decisions become part of the field of its present diagnosis.

Here sedimentation acquires its specifically legal force. A legal decision can sediment into a precedent, a category, an institutional practice, an architecture of exclusion, a record, a technological protocol, or a settled expectation about what a body is permitted to be. The sediment is not merely an idea surviving in collective memory. It is an alteration in the field of embodied possibility. Bodies inherit legal histories not only as texts but as conditions through which they move.

This also clarifies why constraint must not be confused with determination. A legal order can constrain without dictating every response. Bodies can resist, evade, reinterpret, accommodate, and transform the conditions imposed upon them. But the possibility of response does not erase the reality of constraint. The body acts from somewhere, and that somewhere may have been materially and legally produced by earlier interventions.

The resulting circuit is therefore different from the one with which the project began, but continuous with it. A body encounters a political order. The political order interprets the body. Interpretation becomes legal or institutional intervention. Intervention alters the body and its environment. That altered environment becomes part of the historical field from which the next interpretation emerges. Political treatment does not stand outside embodiment. It enters the circuit of embodiment and becomes sedimented within it.

The problem is particularly acute under dictatorship because the political body is made to appear as though it were the source of the order that actually sustains it. The dictator appears to stand above the city, while his authority depends upon bodies, institutions, records, classifications, technologies, habits of obedience, and forms of fear. He can issue commands and authorize violence, and these actions remain attributable to him even though their execution is distributed across institutions and other agents. Relational constitution does not dissolve responsibility.

This distinction matters because a theory of distributed embodiment can otherwise slide too easily into the disappearance of responsibility. The fact that an action passes through many bodies does not mean that responsibility passes into anonymity. It must still be traced through authority, authorization, knowledge, foreseeability, institutional duty, capacity to intervene, design, maintenance, control, benefit, and reliance. The dictator’s position is relational, but his responsibility is not therefore dissolved into the relation.

The same point complicates the possibility of political self-destruction. The dictator in the opening scene does not simply kill himself. His destruction comes through bodies that emerge from him and acquire an independent capacity to act. Yet the relation between him and these bodies is neither identity nor complete separation. They have been produced through the same political history, and something of that history is carried into their new embodiment.

This is where the earlier problem of suicide can be brought into the present argument without reducing it to a metaphor. Suicide ordinarily names an action in which a living person directs the destruction of his own body. The dictator’s fate is not suicide in that literal juridical or phenomenological sense. But it presents a more difficult form of self-destruction: a political body may participate in producing the conditions through which its own bodily continuity becomes impossible. It can act upon other bodies in ways that eventually return as conditions of its own destruction.

The distinction matters. If we simply call this suicide, we lose the question of responsibility by turning a complex historical relation into a single act. If we refuse the relation because the dictator does not literally kill himself, we miss the way embodied interventions can return through the bodies they have altered. The scene therefore occupies the difficult space between self-action and distributed action. The dictator remains responsible for what he does, but he does not control all that his interventions become.

The final act of the scene makes this more severe. The dictator is not merely killed by the bodies that emerge from him. They consume him. This means that his disappearance is simultaneously a transfer. His body ceases to exist as the original body, but it is not simply erased. Something of it enters the bodies that replace it. The new bodies are neither copies of the dictator nor pure opposites of him. They carry a history without being reducible to it.

This is precisely why the story cannot end with liberation. The bodies leave the room, but they leave as bodies formed through a particular history. Their emergence is a rupture, but not a return to an untouched beginning. If a new political order later treats them as though they were entirely new, without history, it risks repeating the same diagnostic error in another form.

The legal question therefore remains after the dictator has disappeared. What happens when the bodies produced by political intervention become the objects of a new political diagnosis? Who decides what counts as their disorder? What happens when the new order classifies the consequences of the old order as if they were simply independent pathologies? Can law distinguish between responsibility for the conditions that produced a body and responsibility for what that body later does? Can it acknowledge historical formation without turning history into an excuse for every action?

These questions cannot be answered by abandoning judgment. Law requires distinctions, and political life cannot avoid judgments concerning harm, danger, responsibility, protection, capacity, or legitimacy. The problem is instead whether legal judgment can remain exposed to the consequences of its own interventions. A legal order that cannot revise its own diagnoses risks confusing the conditions produced by its interventions with independent evidence of the disorder that justifies further intervention.

This is where the contemporary reconstruction of al-Fārābī reaches its furthest point beyond al-Fārābī himself. His physician-politician analogy does not contain the conclusion that political medicine is self-referential in the contemporary sense developed here. It does, however, allow us to see why the question arises. Once political rule is understood as a practical art concerned with the health, disorder, causes, treatment, and organization of the city, the next question is what happens when the practitioner of that art is itself embodied within the historical field being treated.

Gadamer gives us a different part of the problem. He shows why understanding cannot escape its historical situation and why experience can transform the understanding through which an encounter begins. But the present argument moves beyond hermeneutics when it asks what happens after an interpretation acquires institutional force. The issue is no longer simply that the interpreter can be changed by experience. It is that an authoritative interpretation can change the bodies and institutions from which future experience will arise. Understanding becomes intervention; intervention becomes history; history becomes the condition of subsequent understanding.

The political and legal order therefore faces a peculiar demand. It must diagnose without pretending to occupy a position outside what it diagnoses. It must intervene without forgetting that intervention changes the field in which it will later act. It must preserve responsibility without reducing distributed action to the fantasy of a single cause. And it must remain capable of revising its own categories without collapsing into the idea that no judgment can ever be justified.

The possibility of legal self-correction matters here for a reason deeper than institutional efficiency. If law can never encounter the consequences of its own classifications as evidence against the adequacy of those classifications, then treatment can become indistinguishable from confirmation. The system identifies a disorder, intervenes, changes the body, encounters the changed body, and treats the resulting condition as proof that further intervention was necessary. The intervention has become part of the evidence for itself.

The opening room now appears differently. The dictator remains a concrete man, frightened and standing in the middle of the room. The broken glass matters because it changes the relation between inside and outside. The light matters because the surrounding world has entered through an opening produced by violence. The bullets matter because they do not merely kill him; they divide his body. The blood and flesh matter because what follows is a bodily transformation rather than an allegory about abstract power.

The fragments become bodies. The bodies turn toward the remaining trunk. They destroy it and consume it. In doing so, they do not simply reverse the old political order. They carry something of it within themselves. Their independence is real, but it is an independence produced through a history they did not choose. Their relation to the dictator is therefore neither simple identity nor simple opposition. They have emerged from him without remaining him.

This is what makes the scene a problem for political medicine. The ruler who imagined himself capable of organizing the body politic cannot finally determine the form of the bodies produced through that organization. The bodies he treated become part of the history of the body that treated them. The political body does not remain outside its own interventions. Its treatments enter it, alter it, and may eventually return as forces against its own continuity.

But the story does not tell us that every cure becomes a disease, or that every political intervention destroys the order it seeks to preserve. Such a conclusion would replace one certainty with another. The more difficult conclusion is that treatment has a history, and that history becomes embodied. Any political or legal order that acts upon bodies must eventually encounter bodies altered by its own action.

The new bodies have left the room. The first body has been consumed. Yet the political problem has not been resolved by the disappearance of the dictator. The question has only moved into another generation of bodies: what will they do with what they have inherited, and what will the institutions that govern them do with what they have become?

The lights still enter through the broken glass. The room still contains the blood and remains of the body that once occupied its center. Outside, the bodies that emerged from him are moving into a world that did not begin with them and will not end with them. They are neither free of the history that produced them nor determined by it. If they are later diagnosed, treated, classified, punished, protected, or governed, those interventions will become part of their bodies’ history as well. The circuit does not close by returning to the first body. It continues through bodies that have been changed by what came before.

Perhaps this is the limit that political medicine must finally accept. The ruler cannot be completely outside the body he governs; law cannot be entirely outside the history produced by its own interventions; and no treatment can enter a body without becoming, in some form, part of what that body subsequently is. To remain politically and legally responsive is therefore not to abandon diagnosis, but to keep diagnosis exposed to the bodies upon which it acts, including the possibility that those bodies will reveal something about the inadequacy of the diagnosis itself.

The body that diagnoses is always already somewhere within the body it diagnoses. And when the treatment becomes part of the history of that body, the question is no longer simply whether the body has been restored, but what kind of body has been made.

AmirAli Maleki is JURIST’s Deputy Managing Editor for Commentary. Based in Tehran, Maleki is also a researcher specializing in international law and the philosophy of law, and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics. He is the recipient of JURIST’s 2026 David M. Crane Rule of Law award.