When I was in the third grade, my teacher told us that, before she had formally begun her career as a teacher, she was sitting on a bus when she saw Iraqi fighter jets flying overhead. The Iran-Iraq War had begun, and the image of aircraft above an ordinary road became, for her, the threshold between one life and another. She was not yet a teacher, but she would later enter a classroom carrying the memory of that moment with her.

I remember the story now because I am a teacher too, and in the final week of September I am returning to school with the strange knowledge of someone who has lived and taught through two wars. Around me, people speak again about the possibility that war may return; mothers imagine schools moving online, families discuss what another conflict might mean, and even ordinary conversations about the beginning of the school year acquire the shadow of interruption.

I do not want to treat these expectations simply as predictions about a future political event. I want instead to ask what happens to a political body when war ceases to be merely an event and becomes a condition through which bodies learn to perceive themselves and one another. What happens when the possibility of war becomes part of the imagination before it becomes visible in the sky?

Al-Fārābī’s al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya gives me a precise vocabulary for beginning this question. In his account of the non-virtuous cities, he describes madīnat al-taghallub, the City of Domination, as a political association organized around overcoming others. al-Fārābī therefore gives us an anatomy of a political body whose desires, judgments, capacities, and instruments have been reorganized around domination.

My terms—Ethics of Domination, Meat Explosion, Cannibalism for Resuscitation, and Virtual Embodiment—are not al-Fārābī’s terminology. They are concepts developed here from the philosophical possibilities contained in his description. Their purpose is not to claim that al-Fārābī already possessed these concepts, but to extend the problem opened by his account into a contemporary philosophy of political embodiment. Through these concepts, the classical text becomes a way of asking what happens to bodies that repeatedly inhabit domination, remember war, anticipate war, and teach the next generation under the pressure of that memory.

Al-Fārābī’s account becomes especially significant when he describes domination not as an abstract relation but as something distributed through blood, property, personhood, thought, flesh, and instruments. In Chapter Ten of al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, al-Fārābī describes domination in terms of “overcoming, coercion, and humiliation.” This English formulation is my own direct translation from the Persian text. He then makes an even more important move when he explains that the means of domination may be located “in a person’s thought, in his body, or in what lies outside his body.” This too is my direct translation from the Persian text (al-Fārābī, al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, ch. 10, pp. 280–282; my translation from the Persian text).

The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that domination is not confined to an external political decision. It can exist in thought as the capacity to calculate superiority and victory; it can exist in the body as strength, toughness, agility, or other corporeal capacities; and it can exist outside the body as weapons and instruments through which corporeal capacities are extended.

al-Fārābī thus gives us, perhaps unintentionally from the perspective of contemporary theory, an account of political embodiment in which the boundary between body and instrument becomes porous. The weapon is outside the body, but it extends what the body can do. Thought is inside the person, but it organizes what the body and its instruments will do. Political domination therefore operates through a circuit connecting judgment, flesh, technology, and organization.

This is what I call the embodiment of domination: a contemporary reading of al-Fārābī in which domination passes through cognition, corporeality, material instruments, and political structure. The political body is not merely an institution that commands individual bodies. It is a body that forms capacities, desires, perceptions, and relations among bodies.

War consequently appears in two locations at once. Outside embodiment, it appears as aircraft, weapons, armies, borders, destruction, displacement, and death. Inside embodiment, it appears when another body becomes intelligible primarily as an obstacle, enemy, possession, or threat. External war is therefore not the whole of war. It is the material manifestation of a political grammar already capable of arranging bodies according to superiority and subordination.

The concept of an Ethics of Domination follows from this embodiment. I use the term deliberately as my own, not as a phrase attributed to al-Fārābī. By “ethics” I do not mean a philosophical system of moral rules. I mean a structure of desire: a way in which a body comes to experience some forms of action as desirable, necessary, natural, or even honorable.

An Ethics of Domination emerges when domination becomes more than an instrument for acquiring something and becomes a criterion through which things are desired. One does not merely want property, honor, security, territory, recognition, or pleasure; one wants them through superiority over another. The object of desire is therefore doubled. There is the thing desired, and there is the position from which one possesses it. What matters is not only having, but having over someone else.

Al-Fārābī’s description of the people of the City of Domination makes this transformation visible in bodily terms. In my direct translation from the Persian text, he associates them with “roughness, harshness, and intense anger,” as well as with “an excessive appetite for filling the belly with food and drink.” He also mentions excessive sexual activity and the desire to dominate possessions (al-Fārābī, al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, ch. 10, pp. 281–282; my translation from the Persian text).

These descriptions are philosophically important because appetite is not presented as separate from political organization. Political organization appears to produce a corresponding bodily disposition. Domination enters appetite. It becomes visible in what a body consumes, how intensely it desires, how quickly it becomes angry, and how expansively it seeks possession. The body becomes the place where political order is repeated at the level of sensation. The city does not remain outside the body; its logic enters the body and begins to speak through appetite, anger, hardness, and excess.

From this point I propose the metaphor of the Meat Explosion. The phrase is deliberately excessive, almost grotesque, because the phenomenon it names concerns excess itself. Domination seeks expansion; expansion requires incorporation; incorporation produces excess; excess produces pressure; pressure produces fragmentation.

The political body grows outwardly while its capacity to contain what it has incorporated becomes increasingly strained. It wants more territory, more resources, more recognition, more obedience, more certainty, more control, but every act of incorporation also introduces new material that must be controlled, organized, justified, and metabolized. Expansion therefore creates an unexpected problem: the more the body incorporates, the more internal difference it must contain. The political body that seeks absolute unity can become internally crowded by the very materials through which it produced its expansion.

Meat Explosion names the moment at which the political body can no longer metabolize what has accumulated within it. What appeared as expansion becomes internal pressure, and what appeared as unity begins to fragment.

The paradox is that domination creates vulnerability precisely through its appetite for invulnerability. A body that cannot tolerate limits eventually becomes vulnerable to everything it has refused to recognize as a limit. Its appetite becomes its pressure. Its strength becomes rigidity. Its certainty becomes fragility. Its insistence on overcoming others produces a body that must constantly reproduce the conditions of superiority in order to remain coherent.

The result is not necessarily an immediate political collapse. Meat Explosion can be gradual. It can appear as growing anger, institutional rigidity, social exhaustion, intensified suspicion, compulsive repetition of old narratives, or the inability to recognize internal contradiction. The explosion may therefore occur before anyone can name it as an explosion. The political body begins to break internally while continuing to perform strength externally.

This is also why the metaphor of meat matters. Meat is not an abstract substance. It is flesh that has been separated, cut, consumed, preserved, incorporated, or discarded. To describe a political body as meat is to insist on its material vulnerability. Political bodies speak in the language of sovereignty, law, nation, security, honor, and historical destiny, but they ultimately operate through actual bodies that can be wounded, displaced, disciplined, exhausted, fed, imprisoned, or killed. The metaphor strips away the illusion that political organization is purely symbolic.

At the same time, it prevents us from imagining embodiment as merely biological. Flesh becomes political when it is organized through meanings and relations. The body is not simply where politics happens; the body is one of the materials through which politics becomes possible.

Meat Explosion therefore names both a material and conceptual problem: a political body can accumulate so much symbolic and material excess that it can no longer maintain the fiction of seamless unity. What is presented as one body contains many bodies, many desires, many memories, and many incompatible positions. The explosion is the return of these differences from within.

Yet political bodies do not simply disappear when they collapse. Their fragments survive, circulate, and become material for other bodies. This is the point of what I call Cannibalism for Resuscitation. The phrase is intentionally grotesque because political survival is often a form of political metabolism.

A dead political body can return without returning as itself. Its institutions may survive under different names; its vocabulary may migrate into new political languages; its fears may become habits; its memories may become political narratives; its emergency practices may become ordinary administrative reflexes; its categories of friend and enemy may survive even when the original political configuration has changed. What has died as a political form can therefore continue as embodied material. Political death is not disappearance but redistribution. The dead political body survives as flesh in the bodies that come after it.

Cannibalism for Resuscitation is therefore not a metaphor for simple repetition. It describes a more complicated process in which political bodies inherit material from what came before them and must decide, consciously or unconsciously, what to absorb, what to reject, and what to transform. A new body can declare itself radically different while still carrying the old body inside its language, institutions, habits, fears, and forms of authority.

This is why political transformation cannot be understood only through the appearance of new names or institutions. The question is also metabolic: what has the new body consumed? What remains undigested? What has been expelled but continues to circulate outside? What has become part of the new body without being recognized as inherited material?

Cannibalism for Resuscitation gives the post-collapse body a theory of survival in which political continuity does not require formal continuity. A political order can die institutionally while surviving affectively. It can disappear as a visible structure while remaining present in the bodies formed by it. Political death therefore produces not emptiness but redistribution.

Al-Fārābī’s distinctions make such circulation philosophically intelligible. In Chapter Ten, he distinguishes different arrangements in which domination is distributed within a city: in some, the citizens collectively pursue domination; in others, only a part of the city does so; and in still others, the ruler dominates while the rest become instruments of his power (al-Fārābī, al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, ch. 10; my translation from the Persian text). The form changes, but the bodily relation remains: who commands, who serves, who possesses, who is deprived, who becomes an instrument, and whose existence is treated as material for another’s political end.

This is important because domination is not reducible to the person of a ruler. It can become distributed through a political body and reproduced by multiple actors. Once domination becomes embodied, it no longer needs to be imposed from a single center at every moment. Bodies can learn its grammar and repeat it. They can reproduce relations of superiority among themselves. The dominated can, under certain conditions, reproduce domination elsewhere.

In this sense, domination becomes contagious. The political body teaches a relation, and that relation can travel through the body’s different parts. Cannibalism for Resuscitation thus describes not only what happens after a political body dies, but how political forms survive through incorporation and repetition.

This brings the argument to Virtual Embodiment, which is also my own term and the philosophical counter-movement to the embodiment of domination. Virtual embodiment is the capacity of one political body, through different roles and positions, to relocate itself imaginatively and partially into the position of another body without claiming to become that body. It is not perfect empathy, because complete access to another existence is impossible; nor is it assimilation, because difference must remain. It is positional movement: a body temporarily inhabits the horizon of another body’s responsibilities, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possibilities.

The concept therefore begins from a modest premise: no body can fully become another body, but a body can move toward another position. Such movement may be incomplete, imaginative, temporary, and even mistaken, but it can nevertheless alter the relation between bodies.

A ruler may ask what government looks like from the position of the governed; the governed may attempt to understand the constraints under which governing decisions are made; a soldier may imagine the vulnerability of a civilian; a civilian may attempt to understand the particular risks carried by a soldier. None of these acts produces complete identification. Their value lies precisely in the preservation of difference.

The “virtual” in Virtual Embodiment therefore does not mean unreal, artificial, or merely technological. It refers to a capacity that is not yet actual in the sense of being fully enacted, but can become politically operative through imagination, role, language, education, and institutional practice. One body can virtually occupy another position without ceasing to be itself.

This distinction is essential because political ethics often oscillates between two inadequate possibilities: domination and assimilation. Domination says that the other must be controlled, absorbed, or eliminated. Assimilation says that difference must disappear so that agreement can become possible. Virtual embodiment offers a third possibility. The other remains other, but the other’s position becomes inhabitable enough to be understood. It preserves difference while making difference politically intelligible. It does not promise harmony. It creates the possibility of conflict without requiring annihilation.

A sovereign understanding can never be total because sovereignty occupies a position, and every position has a horizon. Despotism begins, philosophically, when a political body mistakes its own horizon for the whole of political reality. The problem is therefore not simply that a ruler possesses too much power. The deeper problem is epistemological: the governing body can begin to assume that its position provides the complete picture of political existence. Because it governs, it believes it comprehends; because it commands, it believes it sees; because it represents the whole, it believes nothing remains outside its representation.

Virtual Embodiment interrupts this closure by making situatedness visible. The governmental body can imagine itself from within other bodies, while other bodies can imagine their relation to government from within the governmental position. Neither perspective becomes absolute. Each becomes aware of its own boundaries. Virtual Embodiment is therefore a form of political self-limitation. It asks a political body to recognize that its own position is real but not total.

This is why it can function as an alternative to domination. Domination expands by occupying the space of the other. Virtual embodiment expands by enlarging the number of positions from which the political world can be perceived. The first requires possession; the second requires displacement. The first consumes difference; the second translates difference. The first seeks to make the other part of itself; the second allows the other to remain outside while becoming partially present within political understanding.

In this sense, virtual embodiment is not a sentimental appeal to empathy. It is a discipline of positional knowledge. It teaches a body to say: this is my position, but it is not the only position from which the world can appear.

The relation between Meat Explosion and Virtual Embodiment is therefore decisive. The first describes what happens when a political body expands by incorporation until its accumulated material becomes unbearable; the second proposes another form of expansion, one that enlarges understanding without requiring possession.

Domination says: I must occupy your body, control your body, defeat your body, or absorb what belongs to it. Virtual embodiment says: I will enter your position without claiming your body as mine. The difference is between consumption and translation. Meat Explosion is the pathology of incorporation without limit; Virtual Embodiment is the possibility of relation without incorporation. The first turns difference into material for the expansion of the self; the second turns difference into a position that the self can approach without consuming it.

This distinction also clarifies why virtual embodiment cannot be reduced to peace in a simple sense. It does not erase disagreement. It makes disagreement inhabitable. Two bodies can remain opposed while recognizing that the other occupies a position with its own horizon, vulnerability, and internal logic. Political conflict then becomes something that can be understood without being transformed automatically into a struggle for annihilation.

The question of war must therefore be understood at both levels of embodiment. War outside the body is material and visible: aircraft cross a sky, missiles strike, soldiers move, borders close, buildings collapse, schools become inaccessible, and bodies become vulnerable to death.

But war inside the body is quieter and often precedes these visible forms. The other body is reduced to threat; vulnerability becomes weakness; difference becomes danger; humiliation becomes a resource for renewed superiority; memory becomes fuel for confrontation. Before a body can be attacked, it must often be rendered politically attackable. It must be transformed, in imagination and language, from an independent position into an obstacle, enemy, possession, or expendable object. This is why war has an inside as well as an outside.

In this sense, war is not only something a political body does. War is what becomes possible when a political body can no longer imagine existence except through domination. The external battlefield is the projection of an internal grammar of bodies.

This does not mean that every war can be reduced to psychology or that material causes become irrelevant. On the contrary, the point is precisely that material violence requires material organization: weapons, institutions, armies, borders, resources, command structures, and territorial arrangements. But these material structures operate through bodies that have learned particular distinctions about other bodies. The political imagination does not replace the battlefield; it helps make the battlefield possible. War therefore belongs simultaneously to the world outside embodiment and to the organization of embodiment itself.

Virtual Embodiment does not abolish this material reality. It intervenes earlier, at the level where positions become imaginable. Its importance lies in the interval before the other becomes simply an enemy. If one body can partially inhabit the position of another, then the other cannot be reduced so easily to a single function. The soldier is not only a soldier; the civilian is not only a civilian; the ruler is not only a ruler; the governed is not only the governed. Each position contains a body that can be viewed from other positions. Virtual embodiment does not guarantee that violence will disappear, but it changes the conceptual conditions under which bodies encounter difference. It creates the possibility that difference can remain difference without immediately becoming domination.

The classroom is therefore not outside this philosophical problem. It is one of its smallest political laboratories. A teacher stands before bodies that will later occupy different positions—citizen, parent, official, administrator, worker, judge, soldier, dissenter—and education participates in forming the relations through which those positions become intelligible.

A classroom can reproduce an Ethics of Domination by teaching that social life is fundamentally a contest of superiority, in which intelligence means defeating another person, authority means silencing another position, and success means occupying the highest possible place.

But the classroom can also cultivate Virtual Embodiment by training bodies to move toward positions other than their own without pretending to possess them. Reading another person’s argument, imagining another historical position, understanding a disagreement before responding to it, and asking how an institution appears from the position of someone subject to it are small practices of positional movement. They do not create political agreement. They create the possibility of understanding before judgment becomes domination.

This is why my own position as a teacher matters to the argument. The classroom is not simply where political ideas are transmitted. It is where bodies learn how to encounter other bodies. A student learns not only information but a relation to authority, disagreement, vulnerability, competition, cooperation, and difference.

The teacher also occupies a body and a position. To teach through Virtual Embodiment would therefore require the teacher to resist the fantasy of possessing the whole truth of the classroom. The teacher must be able to imagine the classroom from the student’s position without abandoning the responsibility of teaching. The student, similarly, can learn to understand the teacher’s position without becoming identical to it. The classroom becomes a small space in which political positions can move without being dissolved. Such movement is modest, but the alternative can be learned just as modestly: the habit of seeing every difference as a challenge to one’s authority.

I return, finally, to the bus. My teacher was sitting there before she became a teacher when she saw Iraqi aircraft above her, and years later she stood before children and carried that memory into the classroom. Now I stand on the other side of that memory, returning to school as a teacher after having lived through two wars and while hearing again the language of possible war.

The story has changed bodies, but it has not disappeared. Her body witnessed the aircraft; my body inherited the story; and now another generation of bodies enters the classroom under the shadow of a possibility that belongs partly to memory and partly to the present.

The aircraft my teacher saw were outside the body, but the meaning of those aircraft did not remain outside it. They entered memory, language, pedagogy, fear, and expectation. In that sense, the story of the bus is not simply a story about war. It is a story about how political events travel from one body to another.

The more difficult question, therefore, is what kind of political body is being formed while a society repeatedly anticipates war. al-Fārābī’s City of Domination gives us the first anatomy: domination inhabits opinion, body, appetite, and external instrument.

The contemporary extension of that anatomy reveals an Ethics of Domination in which superiority becomes a way of desiring; Meat Explosion names the pressure produced when incorporation exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it; Cannibalism for Resuscitation names the redistribution of political flesh after collapse, when the dead body survives inside new bodies; and Virtual Embodiment offers a different possibility, in which bodies enlarge their political understanding not by consuming one another but by moving, however partially, into one another’s positions.

The aircraft did not bring war into existence; they made visible, for one person sitting on an ordinary bus, a political conflict that had already been organized elsewhere. What remained after the aircraft disappeared was not merely the memory of an event but a relation between bodies, generations, and political possibilities.

The task of peace, then, cannot be reduced to the absence of aircraft. It must also concern the formation of bodies capable of encountering difference without immediately converting it into an enemy. The question inherited from al-Fārābī is therefore not simply whether war will return. It is what kind of bodies the city produces while waiting for it—and whether those bodies can still imagine another body before they are taught to destroy it.