Leonard Cohen’s secret-handshake

(French: La poignée de main secrète de Leonard Cohen, Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau)

“Suzanne Vega... sometimes tells a funny story on stage about Cohen’s secret-handshake appeal.” David Remnick, Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker, The New Yorker

Suzanne, 63 years old

A secret is a secret; neither Remnick nor Vega revealed it but, according to Remnick, Suzanne gave us a clue:

“in Vega’s memory, admirers of Leonard Cohen in those days were a kind of “secret society.”

It seems that that secret society gathers the women Cohen seduced or tried to seduce with that secret handshake. Indeed, Suzanne, a few years ago, at the end of a concert in La Cigale (Paris), introduced me to the secret; after a pleasant talk, she held out her hand to me, and, at the end of the handshake, rubbed my hand between her thumb and her palm. Disconcerted, I did not realize it was an appeal and did not react by grabbing her hand back, but let it slip away. All the more as I felt a very unpleasant irritation in my palm. Leonard’s caress was likely softer.

Suzanne’s “Luka”¹ was a difficult child, and difficult children are most often the victims of the repression of autosexuality². This is why they become difficult, sensibly, since the prohibition of pleasure is contrary to life. Parents react to difficult children in the same way they were raised: violence and ill-treatment, which teach the law of the strongest from generation to generation.

Later in life, the war of the sexes is a war of oedipian, neurotic vengeance against ill-treatment by the beloved parent of the opposite sex. Seduction, a power relationship that treats the other as an object, is an element of that war. Leonard was a seducer, and by dubious means; he seduced Janis Joplin by pretending to be Kristoffer Kristofferson she was looking for (see his song Chelsea hotel). His secret handshake is a little elegant means of seduction.

Treating the child as an object, circumcision is the height of the individual’s submission. Leonard rebelled against the pedocriminality that mutilates the child³. In 1994 (at the age of sixty), he withdrew for six years to a Buddhist monastery, where he became a monk. Buddhism is not a circumcising religion, but all religions are fantasies of neurotic males who find in their hierarchies a way to fulfil their masochistic guilt and their domination compulsion.

In July 2022, Suzanne said that, in the eighties, she felt neither male nor female, which changed after the birth of her daughter. It seems that at our meeting in La Cigale, she only wished a fuck, which does not necessarily mean that she would have opted for the male gender. However, the secret handshake, gentle caress or unpleasant rubbing bya loved one, is a “sexual” assault.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZt7J0iaUD0

2 The psychoanalyst Paul Denis uses the word in Le narcissisme (Paris: PUF; 2012).

3 (PDF) Circumcision and traumatic amnesia, Leonard Cohen "avenges" on his father, Morice Benin on his mother, Jean-Jacques Goldman gets out better (updated 07.26.2022) (researchgate.net)

What do you want to do ?

New mailCopy

What do you want to do ?

New mailCopy