Like four books, cracked open and stood on end, the four towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) rise above the Seine. Completed by architect Dominique Perrault in 1996, the glass-sheathed towers were designed to evoke modernist cathedrals while exemplifying Enlightenment ideals of knowledge and transparency. When it became clear that the glass towers admitted too much light—they were effectively cooking the books—the architect designed wooden panels to line the interior of the glassed building and protect the library’s horde. There is a deep irony that the BNF has proven the final resting place for philosopher Michel Foucault’s papers. What kind of archive is this compromised architectural site that promises transparency and light but delivers surveillance and obfuscation? How are we to consider an archive whose texts have always been so dependent on public audience for their use?

These questions are all the more urgent in the face of the recent proliferation of new materials on Foucault’s research and political activism, especially for Anglophone readers. Onto this scene arrives Stuart Elden’s Foucault: The Birth of Power, an indispensable volume that serves as a field guide for those tracing the development of Foucault’s conception of power as it gained force and precision as a guiding concept in his research and politics. Marvelously synthetic, The Birth of Power centers its analysis on the period between the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and the very different Discipline and Punish (1974). Those years mark Foucault’s increasing political involvement, his move to the Collège de France, and a French politics defined by the aftermath of May 1968.

The conceit of the book is to trace genealogically the emergence of power as a concept central to the Foucauldian lexicon, as well as its conjoinment with knowledge (p. 3). And so, one the one hand, Elden offers a “detailed intellectual history of Foucault in this period as writer, researcher, lecturer, and activist” (p. 2). Towards that end, The Birth of Power moves between a variety of registers to consider six of the recently published lecture series given at the Collège de France, as well as essays, interviews, and a variety of activist texts. On the other hand, and in some tension with the genealogical project, Elden seeks to establish continuities across Foucault’s corpus that move inexorably towards a new way of thinking power (p. 187).

To capture the slow evolution of Foucault’s thought, the first three chapters of The Birth of Power move through Foucault’s analysis of three different forms of power-knowledge and are anchored in three sets of lectures (p. 69). The first chapter treats measure, a form examined in relation to the Greek city-state, as well as offering a sensitive reading of Foucault on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. It is followed by one on inquiry, expanded in the context of the juridical and penal practices of the medieval state. Notably, Elden’s second chapter carefully reconstructs contemporaneous Marxist debates around peasant revolts—one of the few examples of political agency in Foucault’s work—and weaves them together with an account of Foucault’s prison activism and militant politics. Finally, the third chapter on examination culminates in a form of power-knowledge characterized by control, exclusion, and domination in the context of modern industrial societies. The remaining three chapters of the book are thematically arranged around madness, discipline, and illness as the topical areas in which power-knowledge comes to organize and modulate social relations. Each takes up the courses central to their theme, as well as smaller side projects that illuminate a different dimension of this theme.

The book’s organization is canny. It suggests that Foucault’s intellectual evolution is best seen as an attempt to theorize the methodology that will orient his later research into those social formations where the linkage of power and knowledge becomes socially and symbolically potent. For Foucault the turn to these formations—and the institutions of the asylum, the prison, and the hospital—represents a marked turn away from a Marxism rooted in class politics and the institutions of family, factory, and the state. Thus the most intriguing chapters in The Birth of Power are those that treat the crux of this change—for the book, an important genealogical impasse—and seek to come to grips with Foucault’s reformulation of production in terms of political power, the GIP's (Groupe d'information sur les prisons) amplification of prisoners’ (rather than proletarians’) voices, and technologies of knowledge. Generous to his readers, Elden does not impose his own interpretation on these textual découpages, but instead hints suggestively at connections to be deepened.

Amidst these careful curations are some missed opportunities. As Elden notes, Foucault’s language of productive power, its circulation and exchanges, and the potency of the prison-form echoes and revalorizes Marxist language (p. 100; pp. 147–50). One wishes that Elden would go further. What are the implications for thinking, as Foucault does, that the prison-form functions on similar terms as the wage-form (p. 59, p. 100)? For Marx, the wage-form becomes the conceptual step necessary to conceiving capitalism as a mode of socio-economic organization that fundamentally structures modern society. Yet, for all the ink spilled on Discipline and Punish, remarkably few have asked when did modern society become defined by the sheer desire to punish. How does the prison, as “prison-form,” broadly transform social value, extract economic energies, and stamp each with moral valence? Such a question requires probing the value systems created by thinking punishment through different mechanisms of compensation, themselves appropriated from economic, social, and legal domains, and thieved by those “exchangers” who present themselves as bearers of value. It would also need to consider how and why the material bases for property and the subjectivities formed through punishment become so easily detached from one another, such that the latter stands in for, or perhaps occludes, the other.

This volume will be most useful to Foucault scholars looking for guidance on which interviews, essays, and activist texts to consult alongside Foucault’s lectures and books. What might it mean to take up Elden’s invaluable curatorial work? Foucault describes himself as “an instrument dealer, a recipe maker, a guide to objectives, a cartographer, a plan maker, an armourer” (cited on p. 187) and thus suggests that the value of his work lies in its use. How might contemporary readers read and respond to these lectures, interviews, and essays as we wrench them from their initial contexts, audiences, and purposes? One possibility is integration: to see various works as “the culmination of collaborative work in and beyond his seminars” but that nevertheless “transcends any of those individual sources when viewed as a single integrated text” (p. 187). Another possibility is to ask what new uses these texts might be put to, especially as readers become historically dis-located from Foucault’s thought-context. After all, there is a tension in Foucault’s work between the dit and the écrit—between the spoken and the written, or the act and the word—that demands to be worked with, worked through, and worked over. Perhaps the task for today’s heritors of Foucault is to return to the fundaments of his research, and to inquire more insistently into the social formations relevant to one particular actuality and not another; to trace the divergent eddies of political, social, and economic powers across these social formations; and to experiment with using these “shards of history” as prisms that refract light onto the present. Elden’s book offers guidance on where to look; it falls to Foucault’s readers to jail-break these ideas out of the glass towers that encase and, potentially, obscure them.