Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book

Abstract

In this book review, Marc Trabsky examines Timothy O’Leary's Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book. The experience book, in the words of O’Leary, “tears us away from ourselves and leaves us no longer the same as before.” (2) O’Leary questions how literature encourages readers “to modify [their] experience, in the sense that [they] would no longer experience the world in the same way as before.” (147) In short, he explores how fiction extols us to ”think otherwise.” Following his exceptional first book, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (2002), O’Leary offers here an insightful exegesis of an ethics of fiction, an art that transforms readers’ experience of the world by daring them to think differently.