Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There
is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the s
cattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent i
ts violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the s
upreme manager of a process of listless implosion.--from Introduction to Civil W
ar Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take fo
r granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek inv
ention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides
, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides--thes
e were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in
all its forms--absolute, liberal, welfare--has been the continuous attempt to wa
rd off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embr
ace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintai
ning control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law a
nd its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power h
as replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the pr
oduction of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available i
n English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, findi
ng a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and
the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setti
ng for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation
is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.
