Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiatedwhole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY holdtogether the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEYprevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.--from Introduction to CivilWar Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take forgranted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek inventionthat condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and totake sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides--these were allone word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all itsforms--absolute, liberal, welfare--has been the continuous attempt to ward off thisstasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil waras a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Wherethe modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation ofdivisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with anetwork of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopoliticalcitizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores thepossibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology ofthe common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. Theysee the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the communityto come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to losecourage.