The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.

In Chapter 7, we find that the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels are afflicted by second thoughts in a manner that brings to mind the structure of sceptical interlocution and the abolition of philia that we saw in Fanon. With the particular case of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, this thought-affliction produces an edginess that is directly related to the character’s unerring perception of the force of the Empire’s ideology and to his sense of having been compromised for being their unwitting agent. As the novel progresses, the Magistrate’s edginess moves from being a feature of his internal interlocution to being defined by his material conditions: he is thrown into jail and tortured. It also impacts on the moral contradictions of his position – having to choose between allegiance to the Empire and care for the barbarian girl. The question of moral residue and ethical choice are carefully examined with respect to the Magistrate.

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.