FOUCAULT'S EXAMINERS RAISED A NUMBER OF RESERVATIONS DURING THE defence of his original thesis, with the Sorbonne historian Henri Gouhier expressing his profound unease with this student who ‘thought in allegories’ (Miller 2000: 104). For the purposes of this analysis, I am grateful Foucault refused to alter his approach. The following chapters consider Farah's first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, exploring it in relation to those carceral concerns and tropes that litter Foucault's early work. Alongside them, what Michael Senellart refers to as Foucault's ‘taste for the labyrinth’ in Security, Territory, Population also captures the imagination (Foucault 2007: 380). Whilst the labyrinth has various allegorical meanings, the above marriage between power as design and literature as obfuscation is particularly enabling. It corresponds with the murky world of Variations where, as D.R. Ewen suggests, ‘a weird cognitive fog envelops even simple facts’, leaving identities fragmented, disappearances routine and bodies either broken or obliterated (Ewen 1984: 201). Farah's preoccupation with the insurgent, if ultimately misplaced energies of the Group of 10 (a group of young intellectuals opposed to the General's rule in Variations) has provoked fierce debate.