Publisher's Synopsis
Interestingly, the emphasis on the machine as desire is present in the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in "L'anti-Oedipe": Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to shortcircuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction. Passannanti shows that mother and daughter share knowledge through the ambiguous language of poetry. The intellect of the daughter is at work in decoding her mother's mysterious utterances, triggered by the disease as a machine. The body of the hospitalized mother is like a machine embodying all knowledge into a stratified text for the use of a special kind of cultural transmission: the mother's free speech automatically reflects also on the meaning of money and commodities (the sewing machine and the typewriters perceived in "In Iugoslavia con i piedi a terra"), which threaten to substitute the human being.
