Plasma is the liquid portion of blood, but it is also a mineral (a kind of quartz) and one of the states of matter. Thus, the term gives us the key to thinking about the constant oscillation between the organic and the inorganic in Clarice Lispector’s work. Faced with the cockroach he finds in the maid’s room, G.H. says: “I would encounter inside myself a degree of life so primal in myself that it was nearly inanimate.” Not by chance, in “The Fifth Story,” a short story published in The Foreign Legion, a book released in the same year as The Passion According to G.H., the cockroach (organic matter) becomes a statue (inorganic matter) in the housewife’s prescription to exterminate these insects: “I was to mix together equal quantities of sugar, flour and gypsum.” Thus the “flour and sugar would attract the cockroaches, the gypsum would dry up their insides.”