Most scholars of Maghrebian literature study postcolonial avant-garde francophone literature of the Maghreb and its relation to French literature as a dialectic of metropole and its periphery, for francophone literature of North Africa draws substantially on French modernism. Some writers, however, such as Mohammed Khair-Eddine, sought to “deterritorialize” French in their writings, and this deterritorialization sprouted south-to-south connections with some Négritude writers such as Aimé Césaire. Nonetheless, these connections would not have materialized without each party’s relationship to the metropole. Thus the former colonizer’s culture remains central to these connections. Mohamed Leftah, however, a Moroccan francophone writer who wrote most of his novels while an expatriate in Egypt, anchored his writings in the Islamic tradition. Leftah’s writing suspends the Mashreq/Maghreb divide and shifts the transnational connections characterizing francophone Maghrebian writings. This author's oeuvre is characterized by its transgressive character; it relies on decadant themes, and invests heavily in opposing normativity—it is a product of an epitomic exilic condition. Leftah’s novel, Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat, narrating a love relationship between the married Ni'mat, an Egyptian retired army official, and his young Nubian gardener, Islam, earned the author “La Mamounia” literary prize, yet remains unavailable in Morocco. I examine how Leftah's linguistic, geographic, and ontological exile conditions his writing and articulates in an unprecedented way postcolonial modernity across the Arab world, by problematizing the established metropole/periphery relation, and drawing on aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Arab world. Leftah’s writing articulates modernity and "dissensus" and search for new ideals in two manners: by anchoring the narrative in Sufism, the precursor of early Islamic had?tha, thus operating from within the locus of Islamic tradition; and through the figure of the decadent, deployed in connection with excessive sexual practices. Leftah's mobilization of sexuality in his writings contests simultaneously the heteronormalizing and homogenizing discourses of modernity, the nation-state, Islamic fundamentalism, and Western Orientalism, thus imagining the postcolonial modern Arab subject as one of differentiation and desire. I draw on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of the connection between the deployment of sexuality and biopolitics; on Afsaneh Najmabadi's study of Iranian modernity through a historicization of sexual practices and norms; on Adonis’s discussion of the role of the Sufis in instigating modernity; and on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of dissensus as essential to modernity.