Corporeal Cartographies

The book focuses on the importance of corporeality in Leonard Cohen's prose works The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). It argues that prevailing post-structuralist theories that describe the body as discursively constructed cannot do justice to the real and violent proportions of the bodies in Cohen's visionary texts. These theories should be complemented by the neo-materialist approach developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who stress the importance of physical forces and intensities that affect the production and the expression of bodies, both in life and art.