‘Of: Becoming World’ is the title of the talk I’ll be giving at the workshop on William E. Connolly’s A World of Becoming. I begin by showing how the title’s ambiguity hinges on the word ‘of’: there is so much becoming there is a world of becoming, and the world can be understood as becoming. But this seems to neglect another aspect: the becoming-world of things and processes, and indeed becoming-world itself. This emphasis is arguably shown by the stress on the temporal throughout the book, and the relative neglect of the spatial.

So I offer sympathetic critiques of his readings of Nietzsche and Heraclitus; relate his work to discussions of mondialisation (which can be understood as a process of ‘becoming world’); and then draw out the implications of his readings of Hegel, capitalism and politics more generally, demonstrating that there is considerable potential in his work for thinking about becoming-world. The becoming-world of a whole range of phenomena…