Barba non facit philosophum. L'habit ne fait pas le moine. In those proverbs, Latin and French, we find the classical opposition between appearance and reality—between the accessory (the superficial, the beard, the clothing) and the essential (the profound, the philosopher, the monk), the latter being independent from and unchanged by the former. Berliner questions this dichotomy. As an anthropologist, he reviews many situations in which humans wear masks or use other techniques to cover their identities: cosplaying, puppy play, historical reenactments, (...) live-action role-playing, and the use of pseudonyms. Cosplayers, the subject of Berliner's first case study, impersonate characters from movies or video games. On the basis of lengthy interviews, he concludes that role-players change when they wear the costumes of their favorite heroes, behaving, for instance, with more self-confidence. A little psychological experiment not cited in this book suggests the same. In 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky asked a group of students to perform a task demanding concentration. Those given a white medical coat to wear during the experiment performed better, probably because they were more prone to adopt traits and postures attributed to doctors—postures thought to enhance concentration. Berliner believes that, in the case of more immersive games, such changes are not necessarily temporary. They can persist after the acting is done. In other words, in some contexts at least, clothes can change the man.To impersonate a historical figure such as Napoleon, another case covered in Berliner's book, the reenactor must pay attention to minute details of the figure's life, habits, and social environment. The reenactor may then experience a moment de bascule, during which he is so much absorbed in his role that he forgets he is playing a character. As such, the activity of imitating is a way of learning some particular forms of paying attention to the individual serving as model. I regret that this aspect of disguise is not discussed when Berliner approaches animal role-playing. He affirms instead that identification with animals “rests upon our imagining what an animal is.” To imitate animals, however, we must first learn about, watch, and interact with them. Imitation is never fully based on the imagination; our imaginations are opened by prior, more or less proximate interactions with the beings that serve as models. It is far from easy to imagine, out of the blue, using our bodies in the ways that imitating animals requires.Despite the book's title, Becoming Other, Gilles Deleuze is barely mentioned in it, probably because he was very critical of the concept of imitation, which is omnipresent in Berliner's thought. Still, the way in which Berliner uses the concept is Deleuzian to a degree. Deleuze is skeptical of the concept of imitation because the success of an imitation is usually judged by whether the model and the imitation correspond in appearance—the imitation, in that case, does not bring any novelty to the world. In contrast to Deleuze, who proposes to abandon the concept of imitation, Berliner invites us to study it in new ways. Indeed, his book teaches us how creative imitation can be. What counts is not whether an imitation is successful but whether it is fruitful, and that we measure by whether it transforms us. The imitator does not become an alter ego of the model impersonated but a superego, an ego more aware of all its capacities. Even if it is never made explicit, the contrast between successful and fruitful—a contrast dear to Vinciane Despret—structures Berliner's analyses, which are a valuable contribution not only to anthropology but also to philosophy. (shrink)

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's (...) analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies). (shrink)

Bayard's book appeared in 2007. Word of mouth about it probably reached me at the time, but it did not catch my attention until the day (in 2012, if I am not mistaken) that a young professor, on the verge of burnout, told me how reading it had functioned for him as a kind of therapy. Though a voracious reader, he found himself confronted by ever more recommendations for reading, some from reviewers whose suggestions were felt as obligations and sounded (...) almost like insults. The line between a reading recommendation and an insult is very thin (the interlocutor may feel infantilized). The young professor was particularly irritated by recurrent advice to read Derrida. Must I read De la grammatologie, he asked, because it is vaguely related to the topic I am working on? Why must I quote him? And if I have not read him, must I pretend that I have?In the academic quotation economy, we very often find ourselves lying to the public, pretending we have read authors whom we have not. For a decade, the title of Bayard's book worked for me as a motto I could repeat internally whenever faced with a reading recommendation, especially when it was broad and general (I have often been advised to read Marx or Lacan, for instance, with no further indication of passages that might interest me). Inversely, when I make a recommendation, I add a little comment on Bayard's book, though until recently I have specified that I have not read it myself. I have hoped my comment would reduce the risk of my recommendations being interpreted as obligations or insults.As is the case with many books, Bayard's became important to me well before I decided to read it (in 2022). An interlocutor, reacting to my recommendation of the book without having read it, told me that the book (he had read it) was more than an antidote for academic name-dropping. It was foremost, he added, an investigation into various modes of nonreading. Apart from pure ignorance (when one does not even know that it exists), one can be familiar with a book just by learning bibliographical details and information about its genre and tradition. One can know a book by hearsay (one can speak extensively about it on the basis of remarks that one has heard). One can consult the table of contents furtively or read some pages randomly.Each mode of nonreading enables us to talk differently about a book, and in each we fill the parts of which we are ignorant with peripheral knowledge and imagination. Therefore, nonreading—active nonreading at least—can be more demanding, Bayard argues, than reading itself. Still, what happens when we talk about books that we have not read happens also when we speak about books that we have read, since we never speak of a book as such without adding what we imagine the book to be. Based on this similarity of reading and nonreading, Bayard comes to a paradoxical conclusion typical of French thinkers: each reading, he contends, from the most inattentive to the most intense, is also a form of nonreading. He misses, however, that by the same argument the inverse proposition could also be defended: what he calls nonreading is already a form of reading.During the decade between beginning to think about Bayard's book and actually reading it, I constructed what he calls a “screen book” (livre-écran)—a work of my imagination. But the book I invented was enriched by my eventually reading it. I discovered that it delivered not simply a criticism of our quoting practices but also a celebration of some forms of active nonreading. In Bayard's enthusiasm, however, I believe that he goes too far when he concludes, with Oscar Wilde among others, that it is better not to read the books we review. Often, as was my case with How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, they turn out to be more original than our fancy is capable of imagining. Hence I have set forth in this review a reason not mentioned by Bayard in favor of discussing books one has not read: doing so may function as a self-reminder. By dint of speaking about a book, one sometimes ends up reading it. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a biologist, but the impact of his work has been perhaps stronger and more persistent in philosophy and the humanities than in the natural sciences. As one of the contributors to this book observes, Uexküll's conception of biology is “more at home among the disciplines composing the Geisteswissenschaften [humanities] than those included in the Naturwissenschaften [sciences], insofar as Uexküll's biology put Verstehen [understanding] before Erklären [explaining].” Uexküll began his career as an experimentalist of a “proto-behaviorist” (...) kind but came rapidly to be dissatisfied with the reduction of physiology to action-and-reaction chains. He argued that the animal-as-machine, the model that lies behind behaviorism, cannot be the starting point of biology. The relation between cause and effect in a machine is direct: the wings of a windmill, say, transfer their movement to a cog even if no one is there to perceive the transfer. In contrast, in the realm of the living, “a stimulus must be ‘noticed’ by a subject” to have any effect. Thus, Uexküll claims, “the first task of [the biologist] consists in seeking out the animal's perception signs”—in searching for what, in its surroundings, an animal perceives and of what it takes notice.Uexküll defined surroundings (Umgebung) as the whole physical reality in the vicinity of an animal, whereas by the term environment (Umwelt) he meant only that part of an animal's surroundings that it perceives. Given Uexküll's understanding of biology as the study of signs of perception (Merkmale), it is no surprise that his work has been a crucial source of inspiration for semiotics. Only one chapter of this new book is devoted to that topic, since Uexküll's presence in the field of semiotics (and in biosemiotics more particularly) is already well documented and analyzed in many publications, whereas his impact on the field of philosophy has been less studied (Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies is, to date, perhaps the best study of that kind). Martin Heidegger was not the first to import the Umwelt theory into philosophy (Max Scheller, Helmuth Plessner, and Ernst Cassirer did so before him, and to each of them a chapter is devoted), but Heidegger is the most famous. It was by reworking an example of Uexküll's—“the rock on which the lizard lies is not given to the lizard as rock, in such a way that it could inquire into its mineralogical constitution for example”—that Heidegger characterized the divergent ways in which animals and humans approach the world. The former can use the things of the world, but humans are uniquely capable of conceiving things as independent of their use of them. We have no more direct access to our physical surroundings than other animals do, but, Heidegger held, we are at least able to imagine our surroundings and the things that fill them as independent of us (and eventually to examine them in the way that a mineralogist examines stones).Thus, Heidegger used Uexküll to set out an “ontological difference” between humans and animals. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, made use of Uexküll to advance a nondualistic ontology in which “the affects [that animals] are capable of” is given as the definition of bodies—a definition, he emphasized, “no less valid for us, for humans, than for animals.” Other philosophers whose understanding and use of Uexküll are examined in detail include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Hans Blumenberg, and Giorgio Agamben; in addition to the complementary chapter on Uexküll and semiotics, already mentioned, there is one on his place in hermeneutics and one on the influence of Kant. The final chapter concerns the remaking of Uexküll by artists. In this way, this collection of studies offers a varied, detailed, well-structured, and engaging presentation of one of the most original biologists of the last century. As a whole, this book is an example of philosophy at its best—which is: when it specifies, pluralizes, and intensifies the thoughts and works of others. (shrink)

The title of this book, by one of the great editors and publishers of our time, comes from its first and longest chapter: “How to Organize a Library.” In it, Calasso celebrates the “golden rule” proposed by Aby Warburg: “In the perfect library, when we look for a given book, we end up taking the one next to it, which would reveal itself even more useful than the one we were looking for.” It demands effort, knowledge, and sensibility to “curate” (...) such a library, where each book maintains good neighborly relations with the others. Such a library is an oeuvre requiring constantly to be maintained and refreshed, because a book is never a self-contained, self-sufficient object. Each book is connected to others in myriad and surprising ways.Calasso applies this relational understanding of books in a very short chapter on, reputedly, the first book review ever written: Madame de Sablé’s little note of 1665 on her friend La Rochefoucauld's Maximes. In that book, which prefigures some of Nietzsche's ideas, La Rochefoucauld argues that “most often our virtues are nothing but disguised vices” (Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés). Before submitting her review to the Journal des Savants, which had been inaugurated only a few months earlier, Madame de Sablé sent it to La Rochefoucauld, asking him to amend it as needed or even to “throw it into the fire.” Calasso compares the original review and the corrected version that was eventually published. La Rochefoucauld erased many passages, making a short text (273 words) even shorter (189 words). In the process, he wiped out the first sentence, the most important, where Sablé summarized what she saw as the achievement of the Maximes: “It is a treatise about movements of the heart of man which we may say have been ignored until now” (C'est un traité des mouvements du cœur de l'homme, qu'on peut dire lui avoir été inconnus jusqu’à cette heure). Calasso comments: “Nothing more radical and more courageous could be written about the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. However, the author of the work did not hesitate to cancel those very words—perhaps to avoid frightening people, himself included.” In other words, Calasso suggests that Sablé understood the Maximes better than its author did. The culture of book reviewing ushered in by Madame de Sablé taught and continues to teach us that a book may be more than its author believes it to be. Indeed, every book is in need of attentive and penetrating readers to discover its latent potentialities. (shrink)

In his latest book, Descola analyzes more than 150 graphic works from all over the world, among which are animal statuettes of the Koryaks, a people of the Kamchatka region of Russia. Those figurines always represent animals lying in wait, ready to jump or already running. Such representations, the anthropologist argues, incline us to pay attention to what motivates and what troubles the animals: “All those animals that we see undertaking an action manifestly intentional or properly responding to unexpected events (...) cannot but impose on the observers of their image the idea that they are moved by aims, that they have an interiority just like humans.” This type of animal figuration is especially common in peoples that in Descola's previous book, Beyond Nature and Culture, he referred to as “animist.”In that book, published in 2005, he described the animist ontology and three other modes of paying attention to continuities and differences between humans and animals: naturalism, analogism, and totemism. At the time, he focused exclusively on the description of those ontologies, as opposed to any study of their evolution. He begins his study of the genesis of ontologies in Les formes du visible by suggesting that each type of graphic work induces a different way of paying attention to psychological and physical continuities and differences. For instance, in contrast to a Koryak statuette, an anatomical plate (to use a simple example not covered in the book) depicts only the body of a dead and dissected specimen. By referring simultaneously to an anatomical description of the human body and to that of another mammal, we tend to see how similar our bodies are. Whereas the animist ontology emphasizes the psychological continuity of humans and animals, the naturalist ontology insists instead on their physical continuity. By producing and using repeatedly some kinds of graphic works, each society comes to favor one or another ontology, one or another way of paying attention to the world. (Descola never says so in these words, but what he seems to mean by ontologies are modes of attention).Descola's questions in this new book are engaging: What do images make us pay attention to? What modes of attention do images stimulate? Each case study selected by the author is, moreover, fascinating in itself: an Amerindian mask, an Aboriginal painting on a piece of bark, a sixteenth-century Mongolian drawing of an elephant. The answers offered for the questions asked are unfortunately always already canvassed by the theory of the four ontologies. In previous work, Descola built that theory based on discursive and ethnographic material; sometimes we are left with the impression that images (as opposed to spoken words) do not make any significant difference, since they did not motivate him to modify in any way his theory in his new book.In addition, Descola's framework brings him to focus only on a particular aspect of what images induce in our modes of attention: in his thinking, ontologies are defined solely by the way we notice (or do not notice) differences and continuities between beings on two levels, physical and psychological, which respectively he terms the exteriority and the interiority of beings. By combining these two pairs of opposing features (continuity/difference, interiority/exteriority), he constitutes his four ontologies. But depictions can produce more fine-grained ontologies by making us pay attention to, say, the separation or the blending of bodies, the stability or fluidity of souls, the equality or inequality of power between beings. Moment by moment, while reading Descola, we find ourselves tied to his four ontologies and indeed find it almost impossible to imagine ontologies other than the four he has set out. In a structuralist vein, he even presents that number as a necessary, logical, and cognitive limit to the construction of ontologies. Nevertheless, by opening the analysis of the modes of attention to more than just the double pair of features picked out by the anthropologist, we could well unearth more diversified ontologies, induced by images (and by other cultural and technical particulars). We could detect, in other words, more than four modes of paying attention to our environment and to our companion beings. (shrink)

In French schools, La Fontaine is presented as “the height of French culture,” but he was only marginally inspired by French poets. His main sources were Spanish and Italian authors, as well as classics of both the Occident and Orient. In this way La Fontaine exemplifies, for Serres, a general pattern in which “cultures grow at the crossroads of other cultures.” One's identity develops out of numerous contacts with others, by learning from them and assimilating some of their qualities—by being (...) open to, not isolated from, the rest of the world. The non-French genealogy of the fables puts in doubt the entrenched concept of identity as involving separation and isolation.Their genealogy also sets a limit on political and moralistic interpretations of La Fontaine's stories. At school, pupils are taught that the Lion stands for the King, the Fox for the Nobles, the Lamb for the Poor. But is it possible, Serres asks, that so many poets from diverse times and places have been describing “the same society with the same hierarchies submitted to the same laws”? As for moralistic readings, Serres shows that for each fable there is a counterfable in which the winner becomes the loser. The Wolf that eats the Lamb in one fable is killed by the Hunter in another. In “The Two Mules,” the animal loading the salt is murdered by bandits, whereas in “The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt,” it is the latter that survives. In other words, the fables illustrate how beings metamorphose into one another: the Wolf (the attacker) can appreciate and play the role of the Lamb (the victim) when chased by the Hunter; salt can lead to death or to freedom, depending on the circumstances. The fables, taken together, offer a collection of behaviors that we, humans and animals, are capable of: our “so-called moralities,” Serres explains, “don't speak about ethics, but about ethology.”The fables offer as well a “palimpsest [that] lies silently in our bodies and our practices.” Serres speculates that the oldest forms of the fables were not spoken, but gesticulated; they mimed animal behaviors. By imitating them, we humans not only learned about the animals we were observing and living with but also about the potentialities of our own bodies. If La Fontaine became the epitome of French culture by assimilating elements of other cultures, then it was by embodying animal behaviors that we became human. (The omnipresence of prepositions in the fables—next to, in front of, under, above—suggests that the body underpins the stories. Those little words, which Serres analyzes minutely in a long chapter, locate each body in relation to those of other beings.)Serres was planning to write a book about La Fontaine as early as 1997. In his notebooks, he scribbled possible titles, all of which are evocative: “Archaeology of Miming,” “Anthropology of Simulation,” “The Fabulous Bodies of Animals,” “The Scale and the Net.” Sadly, he died in 2019 when his work on the manuscript was progressing. He had not yet settled on a definitive title, nor had he decided the order of the chapters and sections. Jean-Charles Darmon, who was allowed to edit the work, faced chapters that were almost completed but others consisting of a single line suggesting a main idea. (The blanks are often about a type of fable never defined or described: “fables of representation.”) In spite of its incompleteness, this book intermingles systematic analysis, textual and historical contextualization, and philosophical speculation—in it, we find the conceptual inventiveness, the lexical and etymological alertness, and above all the joyfulness that characterize the whole of Serres's extraordinary oeuvre. (shrink)

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in front (...) of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency,... but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers. (shrink)

This book comprises forty-one essays, some of them about solar eclipses, space stations, mushrooms, and refugees, but the majority focus on animals, mostly birds. Macdonald starts each piece with a personal recollection from childhood or adulthood. “Vesper Flights,” for instance—the essay that gives the book its title—begins: “I found a dead swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames.... I picked it up, held it in my palm... and realised that I didn't know what (...) to do.” The author continues by setting out the little that she did know, before that encounter, about swifts—she knew only that they are very difficult to observe individually because of the velocity and the height of their flights. To her, the swifts had always been like “aliens on earth.”Those birds are known for their peculiar flights at dusk, when they go up almost vertically into the sky. Scientists used to believe that they went up to sleep; but, at the end of the 1970s, in order to study the interaction between birds and airplanes, Luit Buurma of the Netherlands made radar observations that showed the swifts do not sleep at high altitude. The hypothesis of Buurma and other scientists is that they go up to forecast the weather. In the convective boundary layer, the winds are unaffected by geographic components, and, at that altitude, the swifts may also orient themselves better, thanks in part to the polarized light that is clearest at twilight. “What they are doing,” Macdonald summarizes these findings, “is flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next.”Macdonald was trained in the history of science, which explains her taste for telling stories in which she explains how we come to know other animal species. She stresses the importance of technical devices in the construction of knowledge (without military radar, scientists would never have known where the swifts were flying). In each chapter, she also underscores the problem of what she aptly calls “multispecies social etiquette”: it is such a problem (how to avoid collisions with birds, a particular kind of social interaction) that moved scientists to study swifts in the first place. I much enjoyed reading these parts of each chapter. I was less convinced, however, by the morals that she draws from animal behaviors—for example: “Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our horizon.” What makes me uncomfortable with such general conclusions is that they could as well be reached without the birds. (shrink)