Reconfiguring the urban body in DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003)

Twentieth-century discourses on subjectivity and the city tend to privilege the abstract over the material, favouring the idea of an individual over an actual living person of flesh and blood. This chapter explores these differences and the issue of the marginalization of the body in an individual's engagement with the city as they appear in Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis. This novel reproduces the familiar problematization of the urban body through its unlikable protagonist, Eric Packer, who embodies the drive to transcend the physical in his pursuit of capital and technology. Yet more importantly, the story of Packer's downfall can be read as symptomatic of the dominant idea of the marginalized body of the individual in the city. The novel offers important and intriguing insights into the way the relationship between the contemporary city and the subject can be reconceptualized so as to reveal the urban subject as one who is firmly embodied within the city.