This paper compares and contrasts the aesthetic deployment of empathy and violence in the work of Hoda Barakat and Hanan al-Shakyh. It considers how in the works of both these authors, the affects of trauma are utilized to craft an aesthetics of empathy that is simultaneously an aesthetics of violence. Hanan al-Shaykh's Hikayat Zahra follows a script predicated on traditional equations of the gendered fantasy of intersubjectivity as restorative gesture, only to critique and subvert that script, putting into question not only feminine affect, but also the contexts in which such affect is permitted to circulate. Hoda Barakat's Ahl al-Hawa, on the other hand, problematizes facile assumptions about the relationship between the intersubjective and violence, illuminating spaces where each serves as accessory to the other in ways that also problematize gender. Theoretically, this paper will consider the aesthetics of violence, specifically the usurpation and negation of the other, against the backdrop of recent work in English and Comparative Literature theorizing and bringing to the fore notions of empathy, compassion and optimism. This body of theoretical work includes David Palumbo-Liu, Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed as interlocutors. In this way the presentation also will contextualize itself as part of a larger project interrogating how Modern Arabic literature has deployed an aesthetics of empathy and intersubjectivity to negotiate, resist and co-opt the supposed disenchantment of the Modern. I conclude by bringing the examples of Barakat and al-Shaykh into a larger conversation to argue that in many examples of Modern Arabic prose, a sober, Kantian ethics features prominently alongside existentialist influences; where the mystical and the intersubjective are present, they tend to be framed in terms of responsibility, critique and social change, rather than in terms of the mystical recuperation of a lost wholeness. In this way, this paper and the larger project of which it is part engages with and complicates the field of Empathy Studies, loosely defined, which is primarily concerned with the Anglophone and thus to date has not considered the intersemiotic implications of the study of empathy and violence as aesthetic.