Alain Badiou has reflected that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as ‘worldless’. In such a space, the only form protest can take is ‘meaningless’ violence. Even Nazi anti-Semitism, however ghastly it was, opened up a world: it described its present critical situation by positing an enemy which was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’; it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global ‘cognitive mapping’, which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps, it is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: although it is global and encompasses the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu ‘worldless’ ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first socioeconomic order which detotalises meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning (there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’ no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper – the fundamental lesson of globalisation is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the ‘Real’ of the global market mechanism.