From the public self-immolation of Muhammad Bu Azizi to the determination of Egyptians to occupy the metaphorical "public square" with a bodily occupation of Tahrir Square, the centrality of the body to the politics of the Arab Spring demonstrates the need to read politics in North Africa as embodied. These public politics illustrate the fundamental integration of the human body with the body politic, the need to see the human body as a forum and signifier for political debate. This paper adopts the position of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that human subjectivity is possible only in and through the body; the body is the source of being from which the subject extends to the world. Liberal political citizenship is a fallacy, for it treats the citizen as a collection of legal rights abstracted from the body. The spectacular failure of this model of sovereignty is evident from Egypt to Tunisia. We consider different models of body and body politic in North Africa: a precolonial, Sufi body politic in Morocco before 1900, made visible through health and healing practices, the divorce of body and mind in liberal citizenship, and Islamic modernist efforts to re-integrate the body and the Islamic umma (in the work of Sayyid Qutb, for example). We read contemporary protest politics, state repression, public confrontations, media images and social media imagery, and the destruction of Sufi shrines as texts. Corporeality is an important lens through which to understand the nature of sovereignty (and debate over its terms) in the Arab Spring.