Ruzbeh Saadati – August 30, 2025
Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with the account of a horrific scene: in 1757, in front of the Paris church, Damien—accused of attempting to assassinate the king—has his chest, arms, thighs, and calves torn open with red-hot pincers, molten lead and wax poured into his wounds, and finally his body is quartered. The chronicler writes that although Damien was foul-mouthed, he uttered no insult. From time to time, he lifted his head and looked at his blood-soaked body, and in the height of torture told the priests: “Kiss me.”
It is truly tragic. A man who has been mutilated can no longer exercise his will over his body. He searches for a light with which to reclaim his flesh—even if this reclamation occurs through a part of the torturer’s own body. Here, the politics of the body appears in its barest and most brutal form: the torture of the flesh as a means to seize the soul.
Today, although the politics of the body no longer typically takes eighteenth-century forms, bodies remain arenas of power, sometimes in naked ways, sometimes in invisible ones. In Brazil, social and media pressures impose beauty standards on women’s bodies and push them toward a cultural order. In parts of Africa and the Middle East, female circumcision turns the body into a tool for maintaining gender traditions, thereby perpetuating cultural domination. In Iran, the absence of hair covering for women can carry serious consequences, since governmental surveillance places the body under watchful control. In Japan, the “Metabo” law, with its measurement of waistlines, transforms bodies into subjects of public-health surveillance and reveals the strange intrusion of the state into individual life. In China, in the Uyghur territories, walking patterns, biometric parameters such as heart rate, voices, and even brain waves are monitored and analyzed in a digital network to detect emotions and intentions, turning bodies into objects of prediction and control. In France, the dispute over the burqa and even the hijab of Muslim women shows that even in democratic societies, the body becomes a site of political contention, where, in the name of laïcité, order is imposed upon flesh. Meanwhile, new AI technologies for facial recognition and online tracking turn the body into traceable, predictable, and controllable data: the body is now monitored not only in the street or digital space, but everywhere, as power asserts itself over it in diverse forms.
Power asserts itself even in the smallest gestures of daily life. Foucault saw the body as a surface upon which networks of power are inscribed; from the educational system to medicine, from prison architecture to the order of bureaucracies, all are designed to produce normalized, obedient, and consumable bodies. For Foucault, the body is fundamentally a historical product. On the other hand, Deleuze speaks of the “body without organs”: a body freed from the constraints of predetermined structures of power, one that enables the creation of new physical and symbolic processes. A body that, beyond dominant orders, escapes official channels and generates fresh eruptions. Like an individual suddenly dancing in the street, indifferent to convention, social rules, or cultural expectations—here the body is freed from imposed roles; a moment of the body without organs! In this sense, “organs” serve as a metaphor for the systems that discipline the body. If Foucault exposes the mechanisms of control, Deleuze points toward the possibility of resistance and of re-creating the body. Taken together, these two perspectives form a fuller picture: the body is at once a site of domination and a field of resistance.
Yet the politics of the body is not confined to such examples; it also reaches into domains like language. Language, in essence, is a dimension of our corporeality. Our first words are heard through the medium of the body: lullabies, stories, childhood murmurs, maternal sounds, nighttime whispers, songs in the mother tongue, and so on. At its core, language is the embodiment of thought—just as material as flesh or skin. Within this very terrain, power approaches language: it limits, trims, and reconstructs it in order to seize bodies from within. This is akin to the mechanism Orwell depicts in 1984 with the concept of “Newspeak”—a language designed by the ruling Party in such a way that terms capable of sparking critical thought or resistance are severely restricted or simplified. In Orwellian Newspeak, the aim is to reduce the range of vocabulary so that thinking about concepts such as freedom, justice, or rebellion against the existing order becomes practically neutralized; words are already in the service of order, and the absence of a word renders thought about that concept impossible. If there is no word for freedom, the mind is deprived of even imagining liberation.
Through this mechanism, power turns the body into a mute instrument; a voice that can no longer translate pain, protest, or dreams, because the words needed for this purpose are absent. Yet whenever the subject uses forbidden words or invents new concepts, they reclaim their body once again—that is, they regain the possibility of expressing experience, resisting, and repossessing their own agency and will. It is the moment when the subject can experience both body and language as tools of liberation.
The relation between power and language is not limited to manipulation; it also has another aspect. When power bans a language [a mother tongue], it effectively creates a rupture between the subject and their body. The prohibition of the mother tongue, in any form, means severing the link between the body and the external world, silencing the memory sedimented in words, and erasing the history and culture embodied in the language. An act that is far more effective than the mere manipulation of language.
Language policy in Iran follows such an approach: when a Turk, Turkmen, Gilaki, or other child is denied the right to education in their mother tongue, and when official structures identify their accent as a “problem,” their language—which is the natural extension of their body and lived experience—is denied. In this situation, the child’s mouth must be turned into an instrument for the official language, even if their mother tongue continues to flow in their mind. Here, the politics of the body operates in its more intricate form: the child is retrained to produce only the sounds demanded by the official structure. Under such conditions, just as restrictions are imposed on clothing and the surface of the body, language—one of the most essential layers of human embodiment—also falls under control.
But the denial of the mother tongue goes beyond the mere control of speech; this policy is pursued with the aim of cultural homogenization and the consolidation of dominance over collective identity. Restricting or eliminating the mother tongue deprives the subject of collective experience, historical memory, and the possibility of resistance. The mother tongue is not only a tool of communication but also a ground for representing identity and lived experience. By negating it, power seeks to reconstruct the subject in a controllable form.
This pattern has parallels elsewhere in the world. In Spain, under Franco, regional languages such as Catalan, Basque, and Galician were banned. Schools, media, and literary works in these languages were suppressed so that historical memory and collective identity would be forgotten, and control over subjects could be cemented. In China, the use of the Turkic language by the Uyghur minority is restricted in order to secure political and cultural dominance over that community. In all these cases, language policy is directly tied to the politics of the body and the production (or, rather, the de-subjectification) of subjects: to control language is to control the body, to dominate memory, and to manipulate identity.
The consequences of such a policy are also evident in Iran: new generations are largely deprived of linguistic experience. Generations rootless in memory and voiceless in the present, generations unable to grasp the past and excluded from the “gateway of the now.” Here, the politics of the body has shaped a society in which the official language has become an instrument of involuntary censorship for linguistic minorities. Censorship in this sense refers to the restriction and regulation of their expression, in such a way that they unconsciously suppress large parts of their cultural and identity dimensions.
Thus, the politics of the body is not merely about the control of limbs, skin, or hair. In this politics, memory, identity, and life itself are made to submit to an imposed rhythm. Language, while corporeal in nature, is also bound to thought and reason, and for this very reason counts among the most crucial arenas. That is why states resort to manipulating or banning language: through such measures, they seize not only the body but also thought itself.
Yet just as Damien’s body, even in its deepest state of powerlessness and disembodiment, still longed for touch and recognition, so too does today’s body undoubtedly carry the potential for resistance. Each moment when a person challenges imposed standards of behavior, appearance, or beauty; each time a child summons their mother tongue in the schoolyard; each place where a forbidden accent is heard—the body slips free from subjugation and opens a new path. For all its reach, the politics of the body can never render the body once and for all obedient; resistance is as possible as control, and the possibilities of resistance are always within reach.
In any case, understanding the politics of the body is not merely a theoretical lament but a vital necessity: to grasp which forces, why, and how, take hold of our bodies is to open the way to recovery and re-creation. Just as Damien sought a light through which to regain his relation to his body, so too in confronting the politics of the body we, only by recognizing both language and body, can approach liberation.