This paper emerges from my dissertation project that examines the crises and transformations of Ottoman authority in the 19th century by juxtaposing the emergence of Arabic and Turkish literary modernities. The political, social, and cultural pressures exerted by the Tanzimat reforms and the "Eastern Question"—the re-ordering of the empire that responded to the crises of Ottoman legitimacy and identity and to the series of potential cures (dismemberment, amputation, rehabilitation) introduced to treat the "Sick Man of Europe"—and the attendant emergence of an Ottoman polity per se, I argue, figure as corporeal inscriptions in certain literary and writerly practices. In this presentation, through a close reading of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s Al-Saq `ala ’l-saq in light of its somatic figures, I illustrate how the divisions of the author’s body in this text mirror the diffusion, dispersion, and dissipation of sultanic sovereignty, slowly being disembodied from the Sultan’s body, and how this pairing, in turn, testifies to the contradictions of the emergent possibilities of popular sovereignty. While the conjunction of the gradual disembodiment of Ottoman sovereignty from the Sultan’s body and new technologies of printing have allowed for the wider circulation and dissemination of written material in general and the thriving of new forms and modes of knowledge-production in particular, I argue that such developments also uprooted traditional modes of authority and legitimacy, inducing the deracination of writerly authority and subjecting the textual and political bodies to violent divisions and contortions. The figurations of the authorial body in this text, furthermore, prefigure the disfigurations of the Ottoman Empire announced by the Crimean War (1853-56) and its aftermath.