“I dare not say body” Disfigurement and the aesthetics of formlessness

In Les Chants de Maldoror, figuration is paradoxically linked to a principle of disfigurement: the literary descriptions of violence against bodies appear on a metafictional level as the flipside of an aesthetic violence exerted against form itself. In this way, (dis)figuration becomes a process that is both creative and destructive, a perpetual work on forms in favor of the emergence of the formless.