"Historicize or die!" declared Moroccan philosopher Abdallah Laraoui in the wake of the 1967 seatback. Critical history added the humanist Qustantin Zurayq is fundamental for the remaking of a new Arab self. Others followed suit and by the mid 1980s they all shared the diagnosis that Arab publics live ahistorically. But what does it mean to live "outside" history Thinking "with history", that is considering our physical environment, abstract circumstances and even the constitution of the self as a direct outcome of a causal and temporally bound process of development is the most ubiquitous modern habit of mind. By definition, being modern is being historical. With this in mind, I argue that in reaction to the late 20th century crisis historical consciousness, Sonallah Ibrahim's Dhat explores the paradoxes of ahistorical being in a fashion that delineates the contours of a new form of subjectivity. Dhat portrays a close universe in which the protagonists live in an atomized and discontinuous sense of time which does not lend itself to narration, retrospection and critical reflection. Consequently, they can experience the past only metaphysically or subconsciously but not as reservoir of human experience that can shape their lives and those of the community as a whole. Put differently, though the protagonists, work, marry, have children and lead lively social life, their ahisotrical state of being is an inevitably, and quite paradoxically, an isolated one. A key element in forming the novel's theme of ahistorical subjectivity (al-madmun) and exploring this form of isolation, is its unique bifurcated structure (shakl) in which the story of Dhat and that of its greater environment (daily acts of corruption, repression, financial and political scandals) appear in separate consecutive chapters. However, regardless of this structural isolation, Dhat's work in a newspaper's archive (a place which ironically is dedicated to historical memory) grants her daily access to this data. Notwithstanding this fact, she experiences this information as mundane, muted signifiers that prompt apathy and withdrawal rather than action. Taken as a whole, in contrast with previous critics who saw the novel as a piece of "political criticism," I argue that Dhat is first and foremost a courageous existential exploration of life in a post ideological age in which meaningful relationships to anything greater than the ahistorical self become impossible. This is the deep meaning of "living outside history" and the cause for the author's continuous relevance to Arab life.