Devenir autre: Hétérogénéité et plasticité du soi [Becoming other: Heterogeneity and plasticity of the self] By DavidBerliner. Paris: La Découverte, 2022. 174 pp.

I read David Berliner's brilliant and innovative new book, Devenir autre: Hétérogénéité et plasticité du soi (Becoming other: Heterogeneity and plasticity of the self) with the epigraph of essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips's (2016) Unforbidden Pleasures stuck in my head—a line plucked from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759): “to define—is to distrust.” I wondered throughout my reading how the self at the heart of Berliner's book—many selves, each “multiple and malleable” (p. 10)—navigates the tension between definition and distrust. I wanted to know, through Berliner's rich and immersive ethnographic research, how cosplay, historical reenactment, and animal-human transmutations could remain open and even resist the crushing inadequacy of homogeneous categories—of identity and identification, of experience, of feeling and knowing—whose rigidity and overdeterminacy undercut the capacity of the self to be itself. I wondered: is it the arrival at difference, becoming some other other that challenges these limits, or is it the unfinished journey of change that invites invention and possibility? Already I worry I am asking all the wrong questions. In fairness, this is the beauty of Berliner's Devenir autre: the book is playful and risky, an invitation more than a declaration; its author eager to have readers try their luck at comprehending another's reality, walking the line of the same categorical rigidness that becoming-other eschews. In each chapter Berliner outlines a kind of cosmology of transformation as a series of cases informed by his anthropological encounters: becoming animal, role-playing, the slippery identifications of play and politics are offered through their contradictions and imagined borders, each presented as an inquiry into what Berliner calls exo-experience, “that is to say, a singular type of experience by which an individual identifies oneself with an entity, whether it is human or not” (p. 19). His approach as an anthropologist—one who rightfully refuses to parse “method” and “theory”—is to work both from without and within, to follow change (his, theirs) in mind. It is almost too easy to place this book among other contributions to the anthropology of experience—a line that includes Victor Turner, Renato Rosaldo, Michael Jackson, Barbara Babcock, and many others—and yet, something special is going on here. In the book, long passages on the heterogeneity of such things as furry culture (personas—“fursonas”—adopted as anthropomorphized animal characters) and puppy play (sexual play that bends human desire and animality) might elicit a smile and a little giddiness, but in each case we find serious implications and epistemological questions, namely how these forms of self-initiated becoming, and perhaps even more directly, forms of identification, even ones that appear momentary or contextually and temporally bounded, become radical engines of change and new modes of living. Berliner's book is a master class in source material. Frantz Fanon, Constanin Stanislavski, William James, Jean Starobinski, Georges Perec, Paul B. Preciado, and Hortense Powdermaker (among many others) are positioned in unexpected and generative ways for thinking and rethinking the self. Yes, you are right: most scholarly books reference the work of others, but here I cannot help but to think the analytical apparatus of citation also mirrors the kinds of lively and surprising transformations that the text itself recounts, performing its own form of chance and play. The cases, too, are leveraged comparatively but not straightforwardly, as a way to dissolve the silos of sober topics (racial and colonial implications of fantasy and reenactments; queering and queer life; empathy and escape) and seemingly frivolous ones (wilding, evading, playing, acting). What results is a demonstration of how the fantasies of stability and singular truths are shaken by efforts to think and act with multiplicity or fluidity. Berliner shows that the more the self is made pliable and workable, the more the terms of experience are altered and reformed, creating conditions for reinhabiting the self in different forms, some more spectacular than others. Because Devenir autre does not present a formula, there is no effort to shore up its theoretical claims in conclusion. The book does precisely what it seeks to account for in its cases, itself a laboratory of self (Berliner as anthropologist, interlocutor, and guide is also tested and testing), producing scenes of movement, aspiration, and at times, repair. Still, there are certainly less flashy transformations of the self—splintering, reforming, multiplying—experienced in the course of any given day. The world makes demands and we bend; we share encounters, we code and are coded, we twist ourselves around ideas and identities, through a labor that often goes unacknowledged. Sometimes we destabilize, and if we are lucky, we grow spaces for ourselves—many selves—in this world. But mostly we are lucky just to get by. We might ask through Berliner's truly extraordinary book how the imprint of becoming, its transformations and changes, is logged or lost. What traces linger after the necessary and crucial drama of change, and what do we hope they might leave behind (or end)? The accumulation of selves and what is (maybe even ferociously) discarded strikes me as an ethnographic question, in the wake of our forever unfinished, beautiful, terrible becomings.

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