During the 1970s and 80s the security forces of the white run apartheid government in South Africa gained international notoriety for the various obscenities committed during its interrogation of the political dissidents and revolutionaries of the country. Written and Published during these violent decades, J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barabarians (1980) interrogates the impact of the torture chamber on the conscience of a protagonist approximating the subject position of both victim and perpetrator. Named simply the Magistrate, Coetzee’s protagonist journeys from being a person obsessed with cleaning up the literal and metaphorical filth littering his imperial outpost to an experience of living through the excremental on an everyday basis. This foregrounding of the excremental, I argue, is seminal to the question of relating ethically to the ‘barbarians’ traumatized by the ‘Empire of pain’(Coetzee 24) in the novel. While Apartheid’s administrative measures related to public health—especially of the urban population—was influential in realizing the Afrikaners’ dream of separate development, in Coetzee’s novel the trope of the dirty, infectious, dangerous native is counterfocalized to reveal contamination of the self by the radically other as the only way of gesturing towards an ethical future. To this end, I draw upon Dominick La Capra’s concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’ to produce a reading of Coetzee’s poetics of self-cancellation: a poetics that repeatedly approaches the trauma of the truly ‘obscene’ other without ever being able to appropriate the same..