The paper addresses the conceptual problems involved in the theoretical and practical movement from ''international relations'' to ''world politics''. What makes the discourse on world politics ambivalent and incoherent is the background understanding of the world in terms of totality as the universal set of all beings. Drawing on the set-theoretical ontology of Alain Badiou, the article demonstrates that this understanding is logically inconsistent and makes world politics and the world community ontologically inaccessible. We then develop an alternative concept of the world on the basis of the phenomenologies of Badiou and Heidegger, approaching the world as the void or clearing, in which beings come to appearance. In the conclusion we address the implications of this concept of the world for rethinking world politics and the world community.
