Why add energy to biopolitics? What conceptual openings does such a concatenation or expansion produce, both in how we think about energy and in way we understand contemporary modes and models of power? And if there are conceptual openings produced in this encounter, is there anything that, in process, is also confused or closed down?Taken together, articles in this special collection raise these questions and begin difficult task of providing (at least provisional) answers to them. While they do so through specific lens of discipline of anthropology, problem posed by energy cuts across divisions of epistemology and social ontology into human sciences have been arranged. Energy has emerged as a problem, in part, because despite its now apparent importance and significance to almost everyone, it has not been typically factored into social theory-into broad understandings and conceptualizations of operation and function of social systems and subjects who inhabit them. One might have expected energy to play a key role, for example, in Karl Marx's assessment of operations of capitalism, is dependent on energy like no socio-economic system before it.1 But like others living in early days of capitalism's petroculture (the first volume of Capital appearing less than a decade after 1859 discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania), Marx seemed to imagine energy as an input into system that did not require explicit theorization. The now influential Fragment on Machines in Grundrisse (1993) outlined a world in technological development would eventually reach such an advanced state that labor would no longer be part of production. Instead of wasting one's life embroiled in factory labor, Marx imagined that over time the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to production (1993:705). Through process of technological and scientific progress, we would approach a world in labor time would be reduced to an absolute minimum, which then corresponds to artistic, scientific, etc. development of individuals in time set free, and with means created, for all of (1993:706). This idea of a world without work remains one of most appealing utopian political goals. But even if technology were to be so advanced as to operate all on its own, it would still require energy to function, and energy sources on we have come to depend are in increasingly short supply and generate enormous social and environmental problems as we use them up.2 It is not only our understanding of capitalism that is impeded when we do not factor energy into social theory, but our imaginings of character of social and political emancipation; both require us to better understand that we are subjects who depend on energy as never before.Michel Foucault's theories of social are most rigorous and complete ones with we are working at present time. The influence of his ideas-especially his elaboration of major historical shifts in character of power and his thoroughgoing description of contemporary form that power has taken-has been felt across disciplines. Foucault's concept of biopolitics has been especially important, and has come to constitute a near-universally accepted description of principle mode through states today organize and manage life activity of their populations.3 The concept of biopolitics emerges over course of Foucault's late lectures at College de France, in particular three sets of lectures collected as Society Must Be Defended (1975-1976) (1997), Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978) (2004b), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979) (2004a). And while it would be wrong to suggest that at any point a single definition of concept emerges out of these works, principle idea of biopolitics is stated bluntly at beginning of Security: the set of mechanisms through basic biological features of human species became object of political strategy (2004b:1). …