Can you play Star Wars empire at war-force of corruption without a CD

Yes, you need a program like MagicDisc to create an ISO, bin/cue or uif of the file, then you use the program to create a virtual CD drive, and then from the program load the SW:EAW CD in to the virtual drive. You may have to reinstall the game from the virtual CD but it will run correctly.
Unless of course you meant without ever owning the CD at all, in which case, assuming you torrented the game, you can get a no CD patch from many sites.