Jean-Luc Nancy's La création du monde was published in 2002. It is comprised of three long essays written between 1999 and 2001, devoted either in whole or in part to the theme of ‘creation’. The collection also includes three shorter interventions addressing classical or contemporary ‘political’ themes or conceptual fields: biopolitics, sovereignty, and justice. All of these essays can be said, however, to take on the theme of the ‘world’ from a variety of angles and, more specifically, what happens to the figure of the world in a period characterised beginning in the 1990s as a period of mondialisation. And yet it is the lead essay in this collection, ‘Urbi et Orbi’, that takes up this question most directly. Originally presented in a first version at a conference in March 2001, Nancy's essay should be seen as a contribution to, and an intervention in, the debates on ‘globalisation’.

This word and concept was forged in Anglophone debates during the 1990s, after the collapse of the old Soviet bloc. It was a moment marked both by the expansion of market relations to formerly ‘socialist’ enclaves, and by an array of military incursions on the periphery of the new imperial arrangement, whether in the name of a ‘new world order’ (Iraq), or through the mobilisation of an instrumentalised and cynical conception of human rights (the former Yugoslavia). The opening movement of Nancy's essay draws some attention to the distinction between the English ‘globalisation’ and its misleading French equivalent, mondialisation. Emphasising the distinct roots of the two terms, and the difference between the idea of a globe and the formation or the ‘making’ of a world, Nancy implicitly registers (without mentioning the phenomenon by name) not only the definitional distinction, but the growing antagonism between the two movements: between the neoliberal triumphalism exhibited by the political classes guiding and steer-ing this globalisation of capitalist social relations– an expansion escorted, as noted, by military force on occasion and if necessary– and another conception of the world or the formation of worlds. If globalisation might be defined, in Nancy's terms, as ‘the domination of an empire bringing together technological power and pure economic reason’, then, the struggle against this figure of domination will take the form of opposing a privative notion of the world– the worldless world of the globe– to the movement of ‘making a world [faire monde]’.”