For most of history, and all of prehistory, homo sapiens lived in participation with nature, which allowed people to live in a vital present within whose intimate linkage people actually noticed what was around them. Since then, Badiou says, our vital present has largely disappeared.

First came agriculture, which vastly increased our numbers, established social hierarchies, and began disengagement from nature.

Along came capitalism, which bought people's lives and paid them with barest necessities and cheap goods.

Fast forward to now, where ordinary consciousness is chopped up into clouds of images planted there for the profit of the power holders. We think of ourselves as living in democracies, but power is held by money, an abstract god playing a shallow tune that keeps everyone, great or small, dancing until nature finally cuts it with physical death (that part hasn't changed).

Badiou's pornography is not just sexual images, but the whole cloudscape of images that keep us dancing, images of houses, cars, vacation trips, success. We know the game, because we've been successfully bought off to be more or less satisfied. But our real life, our vital present, he says, has mostly leached away. We sense a puzzling loss.

This, more or less, is Badiou's bleak vision. What are we supposed to do about it? Badiou tries for a rhetorical response, but can really only wave his hands. ( )