Less an argument and more a constellation or mosaic of insights, formulas, and enigmas, The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben is both a courageous delineation of political crisis and an intervention in thought that is both beautiful and cheerfully destructive. That is, this mosaic (inspired, I think, more by the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and also Walter Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) saves, without naming, the potential for the uprecedented that comes out of the delineation of the astonishing: the 'whatever' which "always matters" but which is in no wise the result of a process of any kind. Composed of twenty-nine brief, dense, suggestive sections, this book opens a gateway out of the space of nihilism that currently enthralls the planet in the form of the Debordian Spectacle. The example of Tianenmen is intended to evoke a scintillating, lawless time--blasted out of history--when everything mattered exactly such as it is. Since Benjamin, no thinker has more clearly entered into the threshold of complicity that thought and politics share.