This presentation analyzes Sonallah Ibrahim's debut novel, That Smell (1966), as a novel staging dissensus through failure. While the vast majority of critics assert that the protagonist's failures inaugurate the impotent and emasculated Arab subject in Arabic literature, I argue that this novel instates the political subject as a dissenting one. I draw on Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of dissensus as the moment of the production of the political subject. Sonallah Ibrahim is one of the Arab leftist intellectuals who found themselves in an impasse during Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. While they supported Abdel Nasser's anti-imperialist stances, they disagreed with his domestic policies, a stance for which most of them were imprisoned and persecuted. This novel captures the dilemma in which Sonallah Ibrahim and other leftists and communists were caught. For this reason, in line with Melanie Klein's theorization of guilt and reparation that alternate with hate and hinder productivity, I analyze the narrator's failures, including failure to complete an account about himself "as he is," by arguing that, following Judith Butler, an account of the self is always doomed to failure. The narrator also fails to have intercourse with a prostitute; he reiterates throughout the text that he is failing at producing a coherent novel, writing instead fragmented récits. More importantly, this failure signals an unbridgeable gap between the narrator's and the collective's morals, and this sends the message of Ibrahim as an uncompromising writer and intellectual who struggles to reconcile his ideals with his duties as a citizen.