This article focuses on Pedro Lemebel’s body in its complex relationship to illness. It explores the many functions of illness as an emancipatory power that violently distances itself from the imperatives of health and sex. Relating a personal encounter with Lemebel in Santiago, the article insists on the intersection between the archive and the diseased body, especially the diseased body of the Chilean writer himself. After a portion of his larynx was removed due to cancer, Lemebel symbolically and materially made the hole is his body public. He transformed that empty space into a new organ of communitarian intelligibility and speech: an anal-phabetic archive.