1 Published in Theory & Event, Vol. 16. Issue 4. (2013) as part of the symposium “The Power of Life’s Excess: Contesting Sovereignty from Sites that do not exist” edited by Andreja Zevnik, Erzsebet Strausz and Simona Rentea. Being in Discourse with Foucault: The Practice of Life Erzsébet Strausz Abstract This article performs an experimental reading of Foucault’s selected writings as a creative intervention into the operation of “discourse” and our formation in it both as academic “knowers” and subjects of contemporary government. Drawing inspiration from Foucault’s intellectual project read as a series of responses to his diagnoses of “our historical present”, it seeks to develop a practice of writing and scholarly discussion that provides alternative vistas of engagement between writer, reader and text. Ultimately, the project sets out to re- politicize everyday practices of academic life, (in the hope of) enabling the emergence of new experiences of both discourse and self. In her famous 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” Susan Sontag calls for an “erotics of art” in the place of hermeneutics. As she writes, what is important is “to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” 1 As such, “the aim of all commentary on art should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us.” 2 In this sense, the function of criticism should be “to show how it is what it is” rather than what it means. Instead of trying to “find the maximum amount of content” or even “squeeze more content out of the work than is already there,” she writes, “our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” 3 In short, Sontag calls upon us to relate to objects of art differently. Instead of confining ourselves to the work of t hought in the quest of finding “meaning” we should open up to a different kind of encounter through a more sensual experience of what there is. As Gilles Deleuze notes, Foucault, too, shared an interest in showing how it is what it is; he was “always opposed to any interpretative method.” “Never interpret; experiment…” Deleuze quotes Foucault, where the French verb expérimenter means both to experiment and to experience. 4 Foucault’s “experience books,” such as the History of Madness or Discipline and Punish are clear expressions of a scholarly practice of experimentation where the aim is not to establish “academic, historically verifiable truth” but rather to make possible an experience for “writer and reader alike” that permits a change, a “transformation i n the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world,” and ultimately, a “transformation of the relationship we have with our knowledge.” 5 Here the emphasis is on changing how we habitually relate to ourselves, to others and to the world within the self-evidence of concrete systems of thought through “the endless questioning of constituted experience.” 6 Foucault experiments with experience through creating a possibility to experience things, self, world and others as otherwise. 7 Experience, however, is something that is made; it requires work of a particular kind. As Foucault emphasizes in an interview, an experience is always a “fiction,” “it’s something that one fabricates oneself, that doesn’t exist before and will exist afterward.” Fictions, at the same time, “work within truth” and this “game of truth and fiction,” he continues, will bring to light something which connects us, sometimes in a completely unconscious way, with our modernity, while at the same time causing it to appear as changed. The experience through which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms (for example, imprisonment, punishment and so on) and the way in which we are enabled to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them differently will be, at best, one and the same thing. 8 In the place of hermeneutics, paraphrasing Sontag, we might say that Foucault calls for a pragmatic, experimental ethics of “what we might become” which involves both analysis and imagination. 9 Never interpret but experiment and try that, for instance, through fiction. Yet the work of “fiction” that enables both intelligibility and detachment from socially constituted experiences such as madness, sexuality or criminality already assumes a particular relationship to discourse, the site and medium in which truth claims are formed and where a society’s “general politics” of truth is operational, that is, the “political economy” of the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true. 10 As Foucault said in an interview, “I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions,” yet these fictions were not “outside the truth.” 11 To “make fictions work within truth” also requires us to “make discourse arouse,” to act upon discourse in a way that both exposes