The physical and mental influence of exile on human health has been the subject of numerous debates. Psychoanalysis scholars have described exile ‘as a dissociative state when a self is lost in transit’. From their point of view the most significant impact of the exilic mode is not the impossibility of the physical return, but the inability of remembering different versions of one’s self as a result of spatial and sequential disconnections. Through a psychoanalytical approach to the written exilic experience, I will investigate the textual dimension of the violence inherent in that state of forced dislocation. Through tracing and decoding what I call ‘textual voids,’ I will argue that the experience of exile is formulated most powerfully through the framework of the five senses – sight, touch, taste, smell, sound – and the complex associations and dissociations between the senses, literature, politics, and ideology that characterize the exilic experience. I propose reading strategies that help us to make sense of exile in a new way through understanding the shifting textual pulsations inherent in the physical exilic condition. Through this framework, we can recalibrate ‘exile’ as a deeply sensory experience, not just a political status; a state that is as corporeal as it is cognitive.