This paper offers a reading of Butrus al-Bustani to consider the formation and transformation of two distinct terms in the Arabic nineteenth century: the “social” and the “world.” The appearance of the “social” in al-Bustani is linked to a quite particular sense of the body, and the corporeal, because it is only when the world appears as a space in which the social is a distinct field for the ordering of beings—it is only when the social is distinguished from the ethical, the linguistic, and, one might also say, the poetic—that something like a “world,” in the modern sense, can appear at all. This paper will offer a close reading of al-Bustani—in “Khitab fi al-hay’a al-ijtima‘iyya” and in his Arabic-language translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—in relation to Marx (in Vol.1 of Capital) and Locke (in the Second Treatise of Government), to draw out the sense of the social al-Bustani advances. I wish to argue that if this advance is a particular version of orientalism—if it is orientalism as a social, and if also linguistic, form in the colonies—this sense of what the social is generates, equally, a new sense of the world. Orientalism, one might further say, is a particular sense of the world—a sense opened up through the figure of the property-owning, literate, and temporally coherent subject. And yet if this sense extends itself on a global scale in European colonialism—formal and informal, with and without the jackboots, as Ranajit Guha had it—the translation of these forms in the languages of colonized is equally an occasion for thinking not so much the acceptance or rejection of these forms but their disorder, which is to say—and the reading I’ll offer will try to trace nothing less than this—the fundamental discombobulation of terms, their anoriginary difference and dislocation in relation to themselves. Al-Bustani’s “discourse on the social body” or, one might also say, on “social form” is equally a discourse that harbors a disorder, a rebellion and an insurgency against the forms al-Bustani privileges, and which the coming decolonization—and this is a decolonization that we may also read in al-Bustani—will give to us as a different, and quite other sense of relation, if also—and what could be more urgent, today, and in al-Bustani’s time?—of the world.