This paper investigates the case of Mohamed Leftah, a Moroccan francophone novelist who wrote most of his works while an expatriate in Egypt. This author's oeuvre, characterized by its transgressive character, is a product of an epitomic exilic condition. Leftah was designated the laureate of "La Mamounia" prize, yet his novel, Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat, narrating a love relationship between the married Ni'mat, an old Egyptian former army official, and his young Nubian gardener, Islam, is unavailable in Morocco. Drawing on Edward Said's discussion of the intellectual as an outsider and a parrhesiastes, I examine how Leftah's linguistic, geographic, and ontological exile conditions his writing, fundamentally parrhesiastic and modernist. Leftah's text operates by exposing the acts of foreclosure, and addresses the political and cultural discourses of the modern postcolonial nation-state as well as the regulatory practices and norms established by modern governmentalities. Leftah's transgression through a narration of the body and pleasure assumes the awareness that biopolitical modernity operates through regulations of the body and norms.(1) Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat articulates the modernist's "fearless speech" and search for new ideals in two manners: through an anchoring the narrative in Sufism, the precursor of early Islamic hadātha (according to Adonis), thus operating from within the locus of Islamic tradition; and through the figure of the decadent, deployed in connection with excessive and unregulated sexual practices. Leftah's mobilization of sexuality in his writings contests simultaneously the heteronormalizing and homogenizing discourses of modernity, the nation-state, the conservative Islamic fundamentalists, and Western Orientalism, thus imagining the postcolonial modern Arab subject as one of differentiation and desire. This paper examines the intersection of sexuality, aesthetics, and politics inform the modernity in the literary work in question through an excavation of the haunting excess in the text, be it in a form of decadence, paralyzing failure, hallucinatory narratives, or modern Sufism. 1.I draw on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of the close connection between the deployment of sexuality and biopolitics in History of Sexuality, Volume 1, and Afsaneh Najmabadi's study of Iranian modernity through a historicization of sexual practices and norms in Women with Moustaches and Men Without Beards.