WHO

The individual human participants in this work are called Fibres. A Member is the collective body composed of Fibres. The term Fibre names the singular human strand without returning to the fantasy of the isolated individual. Each Fibre exists as a being-with: exposed to others, acoustically vulnerable, and structurally capable of entering resonance with the Wound.⁠

The term member is equally deliberate. As established above, Saʿdi’s verse uses the Arabic plural aʿzā, from ʿuḍw or the Persian ozv, in the phrase aʿzā-ye yekdigarand: members of one another. This anatomical register is not confined to the famous bani ādam verse. Elsewhere in the Bustān, Saʿdi uses the singular form explicitly: nakhāhad keh binad kheradmand rish / na bar ozv-e mardom, na bar ozv-e khvish, “The wise person does not wish to see a wound either on another’s member or on their own.” Here ozv names the bodily member directly, while the ethical force of the verse lies in the wise person’s unwillingness to see a wound on another’s member any more than on their own. Saʿdi presents this equal aversion as a moral desideratum and a mark of wisdom, not as an empirical description of ordinary human perception. A modern study, “pain sensation evoked by observing injury in others”, nevertheless offers a limited empirical analogue and a close verbal parallel: a significant minority of participants reported not only an emotional response when observing another person’s injury but also a bodily sensation of pain in the corresponding part of their own body.⁠¹¹⁷ Saʿdi’s use of the singular form here recalls why member has already been retained as both a social and anatomical term.

Here that lexical decision becomes political architecture. Across a wide field of somatic systems, the collective body is bounded, mastered, gated, or ranked by creed, covenant, ecclesial incorporation, law, prophecy, wisdom, initiation, purity, caste, sacred territory, sovereignty, nation, empire, party, or ideological truth. In such systems, the body may feel intensely, but its feeling is administered through a centre, a gate, or a hierarchy of authorised belonging. Lingua Membra inherits the force of memberhood from that archive while redirecting it against the very structures that master, gate, or rank the body.

The ideological somatic models examined throughout this text do not derive their coherence or authority from anatomy alone. They are organised through privileged Names that may function as master-signifiers: a god or gods, God, the Creator, the First Cause, the Prophet, the Prophetic word, revelation, prophecy, Faith, the believers, covenant, Law, intellect, wisdom, the nation, the people, race, class, civilisation, the party, the revolution, or another term through which a heterogeneous social field is made intelligible as one Body.⁠¹¹⁸ The authority of such a Name may be embodied or mediated by a Master Member:⁠ a divine or prophetic figure, philosopher-sage, lawgiver, priest, ruler, Imam, or leader held to embody, receive, know, interpret, or transmit the order it authorises by virtue of divinity, revelation, wisdom, descent, office, or privileged proximity to that order’s source. These two levels may converge in the same figure without becoming theoretically identical: a Name or title such as Christ or the last Prophet may function as a master-signifier, while the embodied figure invoked by that Name occupies the position of Master Member.

It is important to note that the master-signifier does not merely enter an already articulated signifying field as one signifier among others; its intervention may retroactively reorganise the relations among the other signifiers and thereby determine how the field signifies. Within the Lacanian articulation adopted here, a master-signifier may itself function as a quilting point.⁠¹¹⁹ The two terms emphasise different aspects of the operation without necessarily designating separate elements: the master-signifier names the signifier in its organising authority, while the quilting point names the instant and locus of fastening. The signifying chain ordinarily proceeds from signifier to signifier without any term occupying the position of the ultimate signifier. At the quilting point, the intervention of a signifier arrests the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification, so that the chain provisionally closes and its earlier terms are retrospectively sealed in their sense. This is a local stitch with field-wide effects: once the relation is fixed, the other signifiers are retroactively reorganised around it, and the field becomes readable as a coherent order. The privileged term does not thereby become a genuinely final ground; it is made to function within the field as a final point of reference, producing an appearance of coherence that conceals the contingency, ambiguity, and incompleteness of the order it sustains.

Within an ideological somatic model, this quilting may determine how “body”, “member”, “one”, “origin”, “soul”, “spirit”, “unity”, “difference”, “function”, “health”, “disorder”, “belonging”, and “foreignness” are articulated and read in relation to one another. Within the field thus quilted under the authority of the master-signifier, body may be read as a bounded whole; member as an incorporated organ; difference as differentiated function; unity as health or concord; conflict as disorder; dissent as illness; and whatever is represented as resistant to incorporation as a foreign body. This configuration of signification is not simply discovered within anatomical vocabulary. It is retroactively produced through the quilting operation and then presented by the ideological discourse as natural, necessary, revealed, or historically destined. The resulting order appears as though “body” had always meant this Body and “member” had always meant a functional part of this whole.

With the operation now analysed, we can return to Khazāʾeli’s pious reading of Saʿdi as a particularly clear instance of it. He places the poem beneath the master-signifying authority of revelation and the Prophetic word. Within that field, “the believers” names the legitimate corpus, while “one body” supplies its somatic unity. The wording of his commentary itself participates in this operation. Khazāʾeli does not say simply that Saʿdi says the sons of Adam are members of one body; he writes that “the Most Eminent Sheikh says” that they are members of one body because in creation they came into being from one gowhar, and immediately inserts nafs wāḥida, “single soul”, parenthetically after gowhar. By naming Saʿdi through the honorific rather than through his proper name alone, Khazāʾeli installs the poet within the pious signifying field as an already authorised speaker whose words are expected to accord with the Prophetic word and Qurʾānic revelation. The honorific marks Saʿdi’s enunciative authority by representing him within the chain of pious knowledge through which his words will be interpreted; it does not itself constitute the quilting point that fixes the poem’s disputed terms. The honorific authorises the speaker; the Prophetic ḥadīth and Qurʾānic revelation supply the field’s master-signifying authority. Within that field, the parenthetical nafs wāḥida constitutes the decisive local quilting point. By fastening gowhar to the Qurʾānic “single soul”, it fixes the governing sense of āfarinesh as creation from that soul alone and excludes khāk, earth, from the operative meaning assigned to the poem’s created origin.

Saʿdi’s aʿzā, yekdigar, āfarinesh, and gowhar are consequently reorganised around this fastening. Khazāʾeli’s commentary makes two distinguishable interventions, although only one constitutes the decisive quilting point. Under the authority of the Prophetic ḥadīth, he substitutes aʿzā-ye yek peykarand, “the members of one body”, for aʿzā-ye yekdigarand, “the members of one another”. This first intervention supplies the organicist proposition: aʿzā are made into differentiated and coordinated organs of a prior bodily whole, while reciprocal membership is displaced by incorporation. The parenthetical nafs wāḥida, introduced under Qurʾānic authority, is the decisive local quilting point. By fastening gowhar to the Qurʾānic “single soul” and binding āfarinesh exclusively to creation from that soul, it retroactively safeguards the earlier substitution of yek peykarand as the poem’s supposedly necessary somatic form.

The two interventions consequently confirm one another, but not symmetrically. The Prophetic ḥadīth supplies the authorised model of one body, while nafs wāḥida supplies the unifying principle through which that body is presented as true. Because the members have already been placed within one body, gowhar is made to appear necessarily to mean one soul; because gowhar has been fixed as one soul, the members are made to appear necessarily to belong to one body. The resulting configuration recalls the Brethren’s formula of “one man, one body, and one soul”, without implying direct dependence. Creation from one soul does not by itself establish one numerically identical collective soul, much less incorporation within one body. Khazāʾeli’s quilting operation bridges these logical intervals and makes the single soul function as the animating and unifying truth of the single body, while the single body becomes the somatic form that confirms that truth.

As shown earlier, the contrast between specified compounds such as jawāher-e arvāḥ and jawhar-e khāk and the poem’s unspecific yek gowhar prevents either the spiritual or the earthly register from being treated as lexically given. Khazāʾeli’s parenthetical nafs wāḥida nevertheless closes this underdetermination in one direction: it binds āfarinesh exclusively to creation from one soul, removes khāk, earth, from the field through which gowhar may be read, and fixes the spiritual register as the controlling account of the poem’s created origin.

The effect produced by the broader pious school of reception traced above, of which Khazāʾeli provides the clearest explicit exemplar within the material examined here, is the affirmative recognition “this is it, this is exactly it”. The reader appears to discover within the poem what the master-signifying field has already supplied as its truth. This procedure belongs to a wider Qurʾānic and Persianate pious understanding of the created world as filled with āyāt, commonly rendered in English as “signs” and in Persian as neshāneh or neshāneh-hā: one sees “signs of God” in created beings, events, and processes. These translations are not wrong, but they name the completed result of signification and may therefore conceal the operation by which that result is produced. Within the Saussurean semiological tradition, the sign is neither the signifier nor the signified taken separately; it is the total constituted through their association. It is thus a third term only in this structural sense: not an independent third substance beside them, but the whole produced through the relation of its two faces. A phenomenon does not naturally contain such a completed sign within itself. Once taken into discourse, it can function as a signifying element; when the signifying field in which it appears is quilted by an authorised theological Name, it becomes readable as a sign of divine agency, power, wisdom, providence, or mercy. The Qurʾānic naming of phenomena as āyāt therefore does not merely point to self-evident signs already lying in the world; it constitutes them as signs within a theological field that directs what is to be found through them. “A people who reflect” do not produce the governing theological signification anew. What is called reflection is directed towards recognising, unfolding, and confirming the divine signification already authorised.

Khazāʾeli did not originate this procedure; he makes it exceptionally visible. The broader pious school of reception expects Saʿdi’s poem to yield signs of Prophetic and Qurʾānic truth. Khazāʾeli’s opening declaration that the poem is a translation of the Prophetic hadith supplies that truth before the disputed wording is interpreted. Aʿzā, āfarinesh, and gowhar then function as signifying elements within a field organised under Prophetic authority and locally quilted through the parenthetical fastening of gowhar to the Qurʾānic nafs wāḥida, where “the believers” names the legitimate corpus and “one body” supplies its somatic unity. His parenthetical insertion of nafs wāḥida after gowhar makes the operation unusually explicit: it places the authorised interpretation beside the word itself and presents the resulting sign as though it had always lain complete within Saʿdi’s wording. Other representatives of the same school need not perform the operation so visibly; they may translate, gloss, cite, harmonise, or simply recognise in the poem the Prophetic and Qurʾānic truth they expect it to contain. By positioning Saʿdi as “the Most Eminent Sheikh”, Khazāʾeli further authorises his words as evidence of that truth. The believer-body, the single soul, and the Prophetic source consequently appear to be discovered in the poem because the pious field has already organised the relation through which its words become signs of that prior truth. The apparent discovery, “this is it, this is precisely it”, is therefore the retroactive effect of the quilting operation.

The ideological force of “one body” lies therefore first in its “one”. In yekdigar, yek or “one” does not stand independently above the members as a sovereign unity. It belongs to the reciprocal compound: each one is another to another, and the relation passes laterally among them without requiring a completed third body to contain or authorise them. In yek peykar, by contrast, one acquires the authority of singularity. It gathers plurality within one perimeter and thereby establishes both an interior and an exterior. The members are no longer primarily of one another; they become parts of the same One. That One may then be represented as possessing one origin, one soul, one spirit, one light, one truth, one history, one interest, or one will.

“One body” may itself occupy the position of a master-signifier when it becomes the privileged Name through which the other signifiers within a field are read. In other formations, however, it is the somatic form produced under the authority of another master-signifier. Paul’s “one body” is constituted “in Christ”; the believer-body is constituted under the authority of the Prophetic word, while “the believers” names its legitimate corpus. In the Greek poetic and Stoic field cited in Acts, Zeus supplies another structure of common derivation: “For we are also his offspring.” Acts takes this inherited formula and stitches the signifier “his” to the biblical Creator, who occupies the position of the One in Paul’s proclamation, so that a relation articulated through Zeus becomes evidence that all human beings derive their life, movement, and being from the God proclaimed by Paul. Fārābi’s civic order is modelled on an anatomical hierarchy and situated within a cosmology ordered by the First Cause, while revelation, wisdom, and felicity specify the ruler’s mediation, qualification, and end; the Brethren’s community becomes “like one man, one body, and one soul” through fulfilment and defence of the Law, with the lawgiver standing to it as the head stands to the body; and the national body may be constituted under “nation”, “people”, “homeland”, “race”, “civilisation”, “revolution”, or another ultimate Name. The privileged Name and the form of collective relation change from one formation to another: one Body, believers, offspring, citizens, followers of the Law, or a national people. The quilting operation nevertheless remains structurally comparable. It retroactively organises the relations among the relevant signifiers and makes the unity, descent, or belonging thus produced appear as though it had preceded the plurality from which it was formed.

Once plurality has been oppressed in favour of one body, one soul, or one spirit, the position of the Master Member is prepared. A head, heart, prophet, lawgiver, Imam, king, priest, sovereign, party, governing intellect, or leader may then claim privileged access to the Body’s unity and determine which differences are legitimate functions, which bodies are members, and which are foreign. The master-signifier has already rendered the multitude masterable by representing it as one Body possessing one identity and one will; the Master Member then claims authority to speak and act in its name. Lingua Membra must therefore refuse both the Member who claims mastery over the rest and the ultimate One that makes such mastery appear natural.

The Fibre is the fundamental human strand of the structure. The term does not name an isolated individual in the Cartesian sense, sealed within private consciousness and only secondarily related to others. It names a singular body already exposed to other bodies through breath, voice, touch, vulnerability, and response. A Fibre is therefore not a passive performer, nor a replaceable unit within a collective mass. Each Fibre carries a distinct physiological and affective reality into the execution: a particular breath capacity, vocal texture, bodily limit, memory, threshold, and mode of endurance.

Within the horizontal assembly, the Fibre remains an autonomous constituent of the work. The system can be repeated and transmitted only because Fibres enact it, test it, alter it, and report its effects. Their experience is therefore not supplementary evidence added after the fact, but part of the system’s internal feedback. Because Lingua Membra is masterless, the Fibre is never subordinated to an abstract collective will. The shared form arises through relation, but relation does not erase singularity.