Review of Jon Paul Fiorentino's Indexical Elegies

Review by jenn angela lopes

Excerpted

Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Indexical Elegies gorgeously unbolts the process of desiring machines. According to former French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and former militant analyst Félix Guattari, “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (Anti-Oedipus, 26). Desiring machines, the spaces in which production of reality takes place, are always binary, involving a flowing thing into another thing that ceases the flow: a breast to a mouth, an index to an elegy, a sign to an object. Desire nourishes itself in its breaking down, in its not being fixed because it is a system of breaks: thought to the pen, pen to the paper, words to the eyes, sounds to ears, everywhere there are breaks and flows.