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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2 | 2021 | 133–157 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.07
* Independent researcher, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Magdalena Germek*
The Anatomy of the World
The World of Anatomy
In this text, a philosophical concept of the world will be introduced through 
a somewhat unusual phrase “the anatomy of the world”. The anatomy of the 
world seems like a convenient term, since it accurately describes the attempt 
to construct a philosophical concept of the world, taking into account its con-
stitution, architecture, and structure – its anatomy. In order to do so, we must 
also apply the method of philosophical anatomy. A general image of anatomy 
as a scientific discipline and a surgically precise practice, allowing a clean cut1 
in seeing and understanding, can be helpful here. Anatomy studies internal or-
gans, making visible what is otherwise invisible and not pleasing to the eye, un-
covering what is covered by the skin. This is exactly what we are aiming at with 
the philosophical anatomy of the world. We want this anatomy to show what 
the world is hiding under its skin, what the world’s inner constitution looks 
like, to reveal the internal organs of the world, to make them worldly – in short, 
to expose the world to the world. But it is precisely at this point where an un-
expected issue arises. For an anatomy of the world to be carried out, we need a 
corpse of the world. And to have the world’s corpse, the world needs to die first. 
Just how can the world die? Does the process of dying require a subject of dying? 
Can the world be murdered? It is exactly these kinds of questions that reveal 
the difficulty of our topic: it is difficult to obtain the corpse of the world. In his 
renowned book Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou suggests a materialistic concept 
of the world, where the world is the place of taking-place where objects appear. 
As we intend to show, this is a specific phenomenological-topological concept 
of the world that ignores death. But in order to obtain the corpse and perform a 
dissection of the world, we need a specific theory of the world, where the world 
1 The very etymology of anatomy can be useful here: from the Ancient Greek, άνατομία 
(anatomía) – άνατομή (anatomḗ, “dissection”): from άνά (aná, “up”) + τέμνω (témnō, “I 
cut, incise”) – literally means “cut up”.
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is able to live and die. Here, we can nevertheless turn to Badiou again. From the 
perspective of his doctrine of truths, the world reveals itself not only as an ob-
jective scene where objects appear, but also as a subjective category susceptible 
to the processes of living and dying. But before getting to Badiou’s theory of the 
world, we will first take a detour. We will make a stop in the world of anatomy 
to check if there is any other connection between the world of anatomy and the 
anatomy of the world, besides the word game. Perhaps, the world of anatomy 
itself can provide the corpse of the world.
But let us proceed in an orderly fashion and in meaningful steps. We need to 
learn the basic rules and principles of anatomy. A short lesson in anatomy is 
needed and we must return to the lecture room, perhaps the very same lecture 
room immortalised in the painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) 
by the Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Our professor of anato-
my will be the respected Dr. Claes Pieterszn, better known to history by his name 
Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the author of the renowned work Observationes Medicae. The 
book was written in Latin, because the author “did not want the public to read 
it and treat their own illnesses,”2 which is by all means an interesting concern 
also from today’s perspective. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a group 
portrait of seven participants observing Dr. Tulp and the corpse of the man who is 
the immediate object of the anatomy lesson. They are all dressed in ceremonial, 
black, formal suits, with a broad black hat adorning the lecturer’s head. The lat-
ter is a small detail that Rembrandt used to emphasise the privileged position of 
the holder and master of knowledge. The least clothes can be found on the naked 
corpse of the dead man, with only a tiny cloth covering his groin.
Public anatomy demonstrations had been held in Amsterdam since the mid-
dle of the 16th century and a supervisory office, the Praelector, was founded to 
this end. In 1555, Philip II, King of Spain and Holland, granted the Amsterdam 
Guild of Surgeons a privilege, thereby allowing them to dissect human bodies 
in order to teach anatomy.3 The bodies of executed criminals were used and the 
activities were practised once a year in the winter, when the temperatures were 
2 Sam A. Mellick, “Dr Nicolaes Tulp of Amsterdam, 1593-1674: Anatomist and Doctor of Med-
icine”, ANZ J. Surg., 77 (2007), p. 1102.
3 Cf. Frank F. A. Ijpma, Robert C. van de Graaf, Marcel F. Meek, Jean-Philippe A. Nicolai, and 
Thomas M. van Gulik, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Painted by Rembrandt in 
1632”, ANZ J. Surg., 78 (2008), p. 1059; Eelco de Bree, J. Tsiaoussis, and G. Schoretsanitis, 
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the anatomy of the world
low enough to preserve the organs from rapid decomposition. These were social 
events attended by physicians, surgeons, and other noble citizens. There were 
dedicated anatomy theatres for such occasions that could accommodate up to 
300 people. These events were also immortalised in group portraits painted by 
the most famous portrait painters of that period. The painters in Holland, most-
ly neglected by the Church and its funding at that time, were supported by civil 
groups and rich guilds. The portrayed people had to pay for their spot in the 
painting, and so one can easily imagine Dr. Tulp paying a little extra to have a 
more prominent position than the other seven participants.
It is not exactly clear how the then 26-year-old and relatively unknown Rem-
brandt managed to gain the commission for such a portrait; in any case, this 
painting made him famous. Unlike other portrait painters before Rembrandt, 
who had painted group portraits of anatomy practise without the human object 
of the anatomy lesson, Rembrandt has given the central position to the corpse 
itself. The meticulously painted male body still fascinates both art and medical 
experts today. Equipped with special technology,4 they examine and discuss the 
anatomical accuracy of Rembrandt’s depiction of the forearm muscle. It is also 
obvious that the painting is not a realistic representation of the actual event. It 
shows only the left arm dissected, which is uncommon in the autopsy proce-
dures of the 17th century. In order to avoid the rapid decomposition of the inter-
nal organs, the standard anatomy procedure usually began with a dissection of 
the organs in the abdomen and thorax, while the extremities would be dissected 
last. In Rembrandt’s painting, however, the left forearm is opened, while the 
rest of the body parts are untouched. Another unorthodox element is Dr. Tulp 
himself, painted as he performs the procedure, which is also a scenario deviat-
ing from the usual practice, where such procedures were performed by other, 
less important participants, allowing a lecturer of Tulp’s significance to proceed 
with the lecture unhindered.
“Anatomy Lessons by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. Medical Education and Art”, Hel-
lenic Journal of Surgery, 90 (5/2018), p. 260.
4 During its restoration from 1996 to 1998, “the painting was minutely examined using a 
stereomicroscope, ultraviolet light, infrared photography, reflectography and roentgen 
photography.” Cf. Ijpma, et al., “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Painted by Rem-
brandt in 1632”, p. 1060.
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magdalena germek 
Although Rembrandt’s painting is more of a symbolic than a realistic interpreta-
tion of the classic anatomy lesson, it represents the world of anatomy well. The 
seven observers are located behind the head of the deceased, leaving the place 
of honour to the anatomist. All together, the doctor, the participants, and the 
corpse form a triangle with interesting relations between them that Rembrandt 
created by differentiating and distributing their gazes. There are different in-
terpretations as to where exactly the gazes of the men are directed. We believe 
the constellation is the following: three of the seven participants are intensively 
observing Tulp’s left arm, the man in the back of the group is gazing at the head 
of the esteemed doctor, and the remaining three observers are staring straight 
“into the camera”. Nothing in the painting is inviting us to a spectacle of wild 
imagination. There is nothing intended to shock. The death is not presented 
as haunting; instead, it is accepted as such and dissected. It seems that no one 
present is looking at the deceased. The gaze of Dr. Tulp is also directed at his 
students and not at the procedure he is performing or at the object he is analys-
ing. The entire scene maintains the scientific character of the given situation, 
which by no means diminishes the vivid curiosity of the students. In contrast to 
them, Tulp appears to be dignifiedly indifferent and professional, as someone 
in his position of knowledge should be. He is not affected by the life and death 
of human organs. He is on a mission to research, analyse, and demonstrate the 
subtle flows of life on the background of death itself. The most indifferent head 
is that of the corpse, of course. Its involvement in the world of anatomy is min-
imum. Although it may be the central object of that world, it is not subjectively 
connected thereto. We can draw the conclusion that every participant is, in his 
own way and in connection with the other participants present, involved in the 
world of anatomy, which is exactly a world of transferring knowledge, learning, 
observing, demonstrating, and teaching. There is another object in the paint-
ing that emphasises the fact that this is indeed a world involving the historic 
production and transfer of anatomical knowledge. By the feet of the deceased 
there is a wide open hardcover book. It is assumed that this book is De humani 
corporis fabrica (1543), a classic anatomy work by the famous Dutch anatomist 
Andreas Vesalius.
Andreas Vesalius was a medical reformer from the 16th century who greatly con-
tributed to the formation of the study of human anatomy as a modern science. A 
spectacular drawing (Frontispiece, 1543) on the cover of the book depicts Vase-
lius’s surgical procedure on the abdomen of a female corpse. The anatomist’s 
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right hand is in physical contact with the open body.5 The direct contact of the 
surgeon’s hand with the wide open abdomen of the corpse can be understood 
as a symbol of the surgical occupation – “the surgeon’s hands act as an instru-
ment of mediating knowledge gained from studying the body.”6 Vesalius’s right 
hand may be pointing to the crowd of observers or above it, to the heavens, 
which gives him the transcendent assertion of a mediator, a representative and 
instrument of God’s creation. It is also possible that the painting depicts med-
icine becoming independent of God’s will. The anatomist’s hand, the hand of 
medicine, will be in the service of science from now on. The hand is also empha-
sised by another portrait of Vesalius, a woodcut by Steven van Calcar, where the 
anatomist is performing a dissection of the flexores digitorum muscles on the 
forearms of a corpse. There is no place for God’s intervention between the anat-
omist’s hand and the hand of the deceased. The entire arrangement indicates 
the superior position of the anatomist, the scientist, as the master of the human 
object. He has the greatest treasure of God’s creation in his possession. While 
God brings life to humans, the anatomist is the one researching this life when 
people die. Such mastery arises from the scientific production of knowledge: the 
human corpse is transformed by science into a scientific object of study.
A scientific analysis, a medical dissection, the hand of the subject of science, the 
hand of the object of science, the demonstration and transfer of knowledge – all 
this belongs to the world of anatomy, of which we have learned in the lecture 
of Dr. Tulp. The human body is no longer covered by the veil of the sacred, the 
mystical, and the unknown. Despite it being ripped, dirty, and smelly, with its 
no longer hidden mucus and fluids, the body does not belong to the anatomy 
of disgust, but to anatomy as such. In the world of anatomy, taboo will gain its 
worldliness through science; it will be exposed to the light, presented to the 
public, and illuminated by human instruments. It will undergo demystification 
and profanation and thus become worldly. Something had to die to become a 
part of this world. In the world of anatomy, death does not represent a loss of 
world, it is not a departure from the world, but an entry into the world through 
5 Below, we refer to the analysis of Adéla Janíčková, “Surgeon’s hands in Vesalius’s portraits 
and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp”, Hektoen International, 2016, https://
hekint.org/2017/01/19/surgeons-hands-in-vesaliuss-portraits-and-rembrandts-the-anato-
my-lesson-of-dr-tulp/, accessed 30 November 2021.
6 Ibid.
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scientific knowledge. Death is no longer a transcendence; it has become nothing 
more than scientific formalisation instead. 
But how has philosophy perceived this world? For Hegel, such an anatomical 
formalisation of death, life, body, and organs, presents something more dead 
than death itself. Hegel sees in anatomy a modus of thinking that imposes a 
problematic concept of (pseudo)science. Anatomy is not based on the true con-
cept of science as an organic totality and self-moving unity. On the contrary, its 
basic practice is dissection. Furthermore, its theoretical approach breaks con-
ceptual connections, cutting the organic essence into fragments, deriving there-
from an empty generality:
Furthermore, that kind of an aggregation of little bits and pieces of information 
has no real right to be called science, and a conversation about its purpose and 
other such generalities would be in no way distinct from the ordinary historical 
and uncomprehending way in which the content, or these nerves and muscles, 
and so forth, is itself discussed. In the case of philosophy, on the other hand, 
this would give rise to the following incongruity, namely, that if philosophy were 
indeed to make use of such a method, then it would have shown itself to be inca-
pable of grasping the truth.7
The method of anatomy is a method of pseudo-science and as such inappropriate 
for philosophy. At this point, we can make a detour from Hegel with a present-day 
example that explicitly demonstrates Hegel’s fears. The example concerns a se-
ries of portraits of Jacques Derrida by Monique Stobienia and Thierry Briault.8 
The portraits show a sequence of the same head in multiple variations: the head 
in warm colours and sharp edges; the head in cold colours and sharp edges; the 
head with a reflection in a broken mirror; the head as a broken mirror; the head 
in a geometric maze; the head shining; the head with one eye replaced by a wire 
installation; the head creating an electromagnetic field; the head entangled in a 
baroque line; the head entangled in wiring; the head mired in colour; the head 
disappearing; the head arising; the head as just a small expression; the head 
7 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard, Cambridge, 
Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 10.
8 I made an analysis of these portraits from another perspective in my article “V ozadju 
filozofije”, Filozofski vestnik, 33 (1/2012), pp. 191–211.
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the anatomy of the world
made to appear haunting; the head made to look disgusting; the head as the 
head of a monster; and the head as the head of a philosopher. Looking at these 
portraits, we can hardly resist the impression that these portraits are an attempt 
at performing a kind of artistic anatomy. This anatomy is specific, because it does 
not show the interior of a human skull, but nevertheless keeps us in the spectrum 
of a metaphoric interior, which is connected to the philosophy of the dissect-
ed philosopher. It is not the skull that is dissected, but a philosophic thought. 
The artistic anatomy is a deconstruction in actu and thereby also an artistic con-
struction of Derrida’s philosophy. With this series of portraits, Derrida might 
have arrived at a unique and the simplest representation of his philosophy. Just 
by looking at his portraits one can directly see what the philosopher’s thought 
looks like, here being presented not through an artistic representation, but pre-
cisely through an anatomical procedure. The head is broken, the anatomy of his 
thoughts is displayed. Thierry Briault and Monique Stobienia have not created 
an artistic interpretation, but have performed an artistic-surgical intervention.
This is exactly what Hegel would never dare to do in his concept of philosophy. 
Philosophy is not an immediate display of one’s concepts, but rather a dialectic 
becoming, a deriving of concepts. On the other hand, anatomy is a paradigm of 
what philosophy must not become. The object of anatomy is a corpse, its prac-
tise is cutting, its theoretical method is an analysis, destroying the very concept 
of science as such. A true science should insist on life and organic unity, while 
anatomy is nothing but a mortifying aggregate of knowledge. And if anatomy is 
a new model of science, then the world as an object of such a science will suffer 
too. It will become a corpse subjected to its analytical, dissecting method. Our 
initial question of how to obtain a corpse of the world thus gains an answer: 
we get a corpse of the world when we subdue the world to science. The letter of 
science murders the world; it formalises it, separates it from the world’s own 
internal organic parts; it rips out all of its life force. “Mortification, applied lit-
erally in anatomy, can perhaps be posed as a metaphor for scientific practice in 
general: the inaugural gesture of ‘modern age science’ was perhaps mainly in 
mortifying its object, no longer perceiving it as a harmonic and living unit, as an 
‘organische Einheit’ and ‘das Leben des Ganzen’; it reduced the cosmically open 
book of God’s disposition to a ‘dead letter’.”9
9 Mladen Dolar, Heglova fenomenologija duha, Ljubljana, DTP Analecta, 2017, pp. 26–27. An 
illustrative example is given in the philosophy of David Hume, who posits in his Enquiry 
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Now, let us turn to a modern example of the concept of the world from the phi-
losophy of Alain Badiou. Badiou takes the concept of the world – subdued to the 
letter of scientific formalisation – to the extreme. The world itself can be reduced 
to the formalisms of mathematical logic. This, however, does not lead to the con-
clusion that the world is a corpse or a hollow shell. As we will see, the world is 
a phenomenological-topological category representing a specific logic of place; 
as a representative of the logic of place, the world is a place of objectivity that 
registers death only to a certain degree. What is called death is merely an objec-
tive degree of appearance that makes no difference concerning the world. But in 
order to detect, in this framework, the processes of mortification and the death 
drive, we need the world to be subjectivized, i.e. subjective processes need to 
appear in the world. In this manner, Badiou transposes the entire question of life 
and death in the doctrine of truths and subjectivity. The world suffers from mor-
tifying impulses, as the reactive and obscure forms of subjectivity actively work 
against the realisation of truths in the world. We will discuss this in detail below.
A Topology of the World
We have already mentioned the portrait series of the philosopher Jacques Der-
rida by Thierry Briault and Monique Stobienia. But the latter is also interesting 
for her cooperation with another philosopher – Alain Badiou. Based on private 
sketches drawn by Badiou himself, she created a series of painting variations un-
der the common name Landscapes. Landscape No. 5 can be found on the cover 
of the French and English editions of Badiou’s book Second Manifesto for Philos-
ophy.10 The cover is painted with rich, geometrically-shaped patches of colour, 
Concerning Human Understanding the difference between the behaviours of an anatomist 
and a painter, aiming to illustrate two possible approaches to moral philosophy or the 
science of human nature. On one hand, there are philosophers, who “paint virtue in the 
most charming colours, getting help from poetry and eloquence,” thus actively shaping 
the behaviour of their readers by vividly illustrating a life of virtue or a life of sin (“They 
make us feel the difference between vice and virtue.”); on the other hand, there are phi-
losophers who understand human nature as an object of theoretic, rigorous, and precise 
research. Hume addresses the first approach as philosophical painting and the other as 
philosophical anatomy. Philosophical anatomy is supposed to be a rigorous and precise 
science about experience. Cf. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, In-
dianapolis, Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, EPUB, Section 1, n. p.
10 In the following section, a part of the material that I published in the article entitled “V 
ozadju filozofije” will be used.
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the anatomy of the world
crossed all over by straight lines and sharp edges, without the geometrical logic 
hindering the vivid tonality of colours in any way. It is not completely clear what 
we are looking at: sea, sky, dream, an abstraction awaiting its meaning. In any 
case, instead of the philosopher’s head, we are faced with a kind of landscape. 
One might find such an absence of dynamism slightly unusual for a portrait 
of a militant philosophy such as Badiou’s. One impression is overwhelming, 
however. As we look at the cover of the Second Manifesto for Philosophy, there 
seem to be no obstacles hindering our view. We get an impression of boundless 
expansion. There is no central point to the net of geometrical coordinates, no 
guidelines dictating the direction our gaze is supposed to take. This effect is not 
achieved with a parallelism, but with the lines intersecting under different an-
gles. Our sight is not entangled in a chaos of threads, but rather freed by its col-
ourful and geometric consistency, arrangement, symmetry, and certainty that 
only order can provide. We are presented with a cosmos. An orderliness that 
spreads; the boundlessness of the universe. Cold and warm nuances. Our sight 
is calmed by concrete colours. All in all, it is a scheme of a general concept of the 
world. An image of the universe. The main motif of the Landscape is a motif of 
worldliness. The topology of the world it presents gives us an excellent starting 
point to further contemplate the anatomy of the world.
Stobienia’s painting reveals several key features of Badiou’s concept of the world. 
The first obvious feature of the world is that it is depicted without a source, 
without a creator responsible for its constitution; there is no point from which 
everything can be deduced, neither is there a point to which everything can be 
reduced. Another significant feature of the world is that it is an orderliness, em-
phasised by the geometrical net “where the lines’ structured force merges with 
an original conception of colour.”11 The landscape is painted in colours with a 
prevailing geometric-architectural style, which is an excellent choice to present 
another important feature of Badiou’s concept of the world, namely that it is 
logical. The world is a site of a unique objective transcendental logic, which is 
independent of the constitution of any transcendental subject. This logic arises 
from a few basic transcendental operations that are able to describe an infinite 
number of different worlds, given that there is also an infinite number of differ-
ent logics of worlds. For Badiou, the world is an objective (non-subjective) cat-
11 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. L. Burchill, Cambridge and Malden, 
Polity Press, 2011, p. vi.
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egory par excellence, studied by an objective (non-subjective) phenomenology. 
In his Logics of Worlds, Badiou proposes an unorthodox concept of phenome-
nology that refuses the categories of subjective consciousness, perception, and 
experience and is derived from the concepts of the transcendental, object, and 
relation, which are all deemed to be strictly independent of the category of the 
(transcendental) subject.
For Badiou, the world is “the place in which objects appear”12 or “the place of 
taking-place.”13 This means that the world is a phenomenological category that 
must also be considered topologically – through the logic of place. Whereas 
Badiou is mostly noted for his ontological project, we must note that Badiou’s 
consideration of the logic of place (providing him a path to phenomenology) 
reaches all the way back to the works from his youth. In his text “The (Re)com-
mencement of Dialectical Materialism” from 1967, Badiou critically addresses 
Althusser’s theory of structural causality, namely by means of the thesis that Al-
thusser’s partition to numerous practices and instances requires a general and 
formal theory of multiplicity: “There must exist a previous formal discipline, 
which I would be tempted to call the theory of historical sets, which contains at 
least the protocols of ‘donation’ of the pure multiples onto which the structures 
are progressively constructed.”14 In Badiou’s proposal, one can recognise the 
first signs of referring to mathematical set theory, which will take centre stage in 
his ontological project at the end of the 1980s. However, it is important to note 
an additional aspect here. Badiou goes on to say that his proposal refers to a 
discipline “which is closely tied in its complete development to the mathematics 
of set theory,” but nevertheless exceeds “the simple donation of a procedure of 
belonging.”15 The new formal discipline of historical sets would exceed mathe-
matical set theory (where all basic operations on sets are reducible to the prima-
ry relation of belonging) by following the rules of spatiality: “the conjuncture 
had to be thought as a definite system of ‘places’ in which the instances come 
12 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano, London, Continuum, 
2009, p. 598.
13 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham, London, Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013, 
p. 26.
14 Alain Badiou, “The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism”, in The Adventure of 
French Philosophy, B. Bosteels (ed. and trans.), London and New York, Verso, 2012, p. 163.
15 Ibid.
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the anatomy of the world
to articulate themselves onto one another.”16 The concept of determination will 
include both of these elements: on the one hand, it will have at its disposal the 
P set as a set of places, and on the other hand, the F set as a set of functions and 
practices receiving their value from P. The mathematical theory that here serves 
Badiou as a paradigm to think the “system of places” is the mathematical theory 
of categories, of which he says the following:
The theory of categories is perhaps the most significant epistemological event of 
these last years, due to the radical effort of abstraction to which it bears witness. 
Mathematical structures are not properly speaking constructed in it according 
to operational links between elements of a pure multiplicity (set); but they rather 
appear as “summits” of a network of trajectories in which the structural corre-
spondences (the morphisms) are primary. In the Universe (such is the concept 
used) that is thus drawn, Structure of structures, multiplicity is not one struc-
ture among others: one will speak of the Category of sets as well as of the Cate-
gory of groups, etc.17
In a series of seminars published in 1982 under the title Theory of the Subject, 
Badiou reintroduced the idea of a general concept of place (P), which he devel-
oped through the abstract and formal differentiation between pure being and 
the being-there. He introduced this difference using the Hegelian pair of “some-
thing” (Etwas) and “something else” (Anderes): there is an A (Etwas), a pure 
being, and another, duplicated A (Anderes), which is A taking place, the placed 
being, Ap. In the first case, we are dealing with a “pure identity”;18 in the second 
case, with a “placed identity”.19 This placed identity marks the pure identity of 
all possible ways of an A belonging to a P, which is abstractly perceived as a gen-
erality of the place and represents the “being-placed” as such. The significance 
of P is merely that it represents a reference in the relationship to which we note 
the placed identity Ap. In a way, A does not even exist as a pure being, since 
by saying something about it, we already place A in a certain identity, i.e. Ap1, 
Ap2 …, which means that A is always presented as Ap. If A is pure being, then, 
ontologically speaking, A is nothing; but if A exists, an indexed identity will be 
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., note 166.
18 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, London, Continuum, 2009, p. 6.
19 Ibid.
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assigned to it, dividing it from the inside. A is never equal to A, except when it is 
simply not; rather, it is inevitably its own duality of a pure and placed identity. 
A can thus be comprehended through “a constitutive scission: A = (AAp).”20 The 
contradiction between a pure being and structure drives the dialectic, which is 
not a dialectic of the idealistic synthesis (thesis and antithesis), but a materi-
alistic dialectic of the scission “based upon the contradiction between A and 
P, between the existent and its place.”21 A pure identity is thus never pure; in-
stead, the pure being and a structural place, a certain P, to which it belongs, is 
inscribed in it.22
Although Badiou had seriously unfolded his theory of place for the first time in 
his book Theory of the Subject, the mathematical theory of categories gained its 
central philosophical significance with the Logics of Worlds, where it is made 
equal to the phenomenology of the world in the same manner as the mathemati-
cal theory of sets is made equal to the ontology of the pure being in his Being and 
Event. The trajectory of the tense relation between the pure and placed being in 
Badiou’s philosophy therefore advances as follows: in Theory of the Subject, Ba-
diou sets out the contradictory relationship between the pure being and the gen-
eral structure of place P; in Being and Event, however, he is focused on the pure 
being as a being that is presented in the ontological form of a pure multiple; 
and in Logics of Worlds, the focus is again on the logic of place and the localised 
identity. Hence, it seems that there is a continuity between Logics of Worlds and 
Theory of the Subject, briefly interrupted by Being and Event. We must add, how-
ever, that there is nonetheless a moment in Being and Event where Badiou hints 
at the logic of place. Ontology refers to the structurability of a structure, where-
by something of this structure is being structured as presented and consistent. 
Badiou named the process of structuration as the count-as-one, leading us to 
the presented multiple or situation. Any presented multiple is a situation where 
this situation is “the place of taking-place” that is indifferent to the elements 
of the set.23 At this point, Badiou introduces two ways of comprehending situ-
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 7.
22 How this logic also remains crucially pertinent to the analysis of contemporary capitalism 
has been most recently highlighted by Uroš Kranjc. Cf. Uroš Kranjc, “On the Notions of Po-
lice/State (of Situation): An Economic Perspective in Light of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, 
Critical Horizons, 22 (3/2021), pp. 312–315.  
23 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 26.
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the anatomy of the world
ations: situations as consistent presented multiples and situations as worlds, as 
the domain of models.24 What we are interested in is the situation comprehended 
as a world that is “the place of taking-place.”25
According to set theory, belonging to a pure multiple is a formal way of saying 
that something is at all.26 But to belong to a set simultaneously bears witness to 
the fact that something of the being is placed in the given set, that something 
of the being is situated and localised in relation to this set. In ontology, the el-
ements of a pure set are also pure sets themselves and therefore one can build 
complex structures based on the pure form of a multiple. However, ontology 
does not question the form of a multiple, which is measured in relation to local-
isation. Hence, ontology is focused on the composition that can be formed with 
the elements of a set, but it tells nothing about their relation to this set. In this 
regard, it is possible to introduce a distinction between the proposition that a 
certain x is, that it belongs to situation S, and the proposition that x exists, that it 
belongs to situation S, “in so far as it exists, x is situated, it exists in a situation 
(or in several).”27 In relation to the latter proposition, Badiou says, “the belong-
ing of x to the situation is called its appearance.”28
As opposed to the ontological form of the pure multiple, the phenomenologi-
cal form points to the being placed in a situation; it points to how x “happens 
at some place”, how x appears. We must emphasise, however, that it is always 
the same being that is at stake: the being that is intrinsically thought as the 
being qua being, and the same pure being, thought as a being that is localised, 
that is there. The difference arises from the modus of thinking and the formal 
operations used by mathematics. In the first instance, the being is thought on-
tologically and this ontological thinking uses set theory to present the being 
axiomatically. In the second instance, the being is thought topologically, which 
24 Burhanuddin Baki, Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory, London, 
Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 71.
25 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 26.
26 For an interesting recent analysis of this see Rok Benčin “Rethinking Representation in 
Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Rancière”, Theory, Culture & Society, 36 (5/2019), 
pp. 95–112.
27 Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. R. Brassier and A. Toscano, London and New 
York, Continuum, 2004, p. 181.
28 Ibid.
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magdalena germek 
is the kind of thinking that is at work in the mathematical theory of catego-
ries that uses the “topos” operator. According to Badiou, topological thinking 
is phenomenological, because it is the same to consider the appearing of the 
being and to consider the being as being-there. Hence the world is thought in 
relation to the placed, situated being, which is there. Taking place as such, the 
world is not limited to the coordinates of the physical space and time. Badiou 
also vigorously rejects Aristotle’s paradigm of the “natural place” to which the 
unmoved mover forces all natural things. “We will posit that there is no natural 
place.”29 “Place” is a concern of logic and it is established by Russell’s paradox. 
Russell had demonstrated that the concept of universe, perceived as the Whole 
or a totality, is a contradictory concept. If we reject the Whole as inconsistent, 
we get the concept of the world. The world is necessarily localised. If there is no 
whole, there are multiple worlds. The logic of place is therefore not a logic of the 
“natural” distribution of places within a certain universal place, but rather an 
inevitable consequence of the fact that there is no general Place. The latter is an 
inconsistency, while the former is a consistency in actu. Appearing is logical pre-
cisely because logic is violent in a way that is logical only for logic: logic breaks 
inconsistency, forbids chaos, sanctions paradoxes, and forces inconsistency 
into consistency and order. And order is related to violence; cosmos is not given, 
but gained. The violence of logic is not conditioned or caused by anything; it is 
violence for no cause. This means that being does not appear through a deduc-
tion, but through the violence of contingency.
The world is a logical consistency and a consequence of the totality being incon-
sistent. As a consequence of logic, it does not need the work of a subject to be 
constituted. For its existence, it only needs a topological push, which happens 
as a pure contingency: “The fact that a multiple is in some way localized, such 
that the multiple-indifference of its being is assigned to a world, goes beyond 
the resource of this multiple-being as thought by mathematics. A sort of impe-
tus, topological in essence, prevents the multiple from being merely what it is 
since, as what appears, it is there that it has to be what it is.”30 Nothing in being 
qua being requires it to localise, as being is indifferent to its appearance. The 
topological push does not cause the multiple to appear, but rather causes the 
multiple’s discontent with being what it is. The indifferent form of the multiple 
29 Ibid.
30 Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 30.
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the anatomy of the world
disregards its disinterest and its indifference: this indifference to indifference 
causes being to become interested and to move from indifference to difference. 
The first difference of being is that being is there. The first difference is therefore 
a topological, i.e. phenomenological, one.
In such a formalised concept of the world, there is no pathos towards the pro-
cesses of death and dying. The world exists by way of its transcendental oper-
ations and these operations also constitute existence in the coordinates of the 
world. The existence of a multiple is measured in relation to a certain world and 
marks the degree of identity by which this identity appears identical to itself in 
this world. This degree can be minimum (in this case, we are dealing with “the 
inexistent”), maximum, or some intermediate degree between the minimum 
and the maximum of appearing. Death is not a category of being as such, but is 
rather something that happens to the existent, “an affection of appearing,”31 a 
transition from the positive degree of appearing of the existent to its minimum 
degree of appearing in relation to the world given. Death happens to the existent 
as something external, a consequence of a contingent cause. Here, Badiou does 
not consent to the idea that death is an intrinsic characteristic of the existent, 
that we are inevitably mortal beings; instead, he understands death as a logi-
cal correlation that contingently enforces itself upon the function of appearing: 
“At most we can accept that death is possible for it, in the sense that an abrupt 
change in the function of appearing may befall it and that this change may 
amount to a minimization of its identity, and thus of its degree of existence.”32
At the same time, the central part of Badiou’s philosophy belongs to the doc-
trine of truths that offer the essential link between the world and subjective 
processes. According to this doctrine, truths are procedures that appear on the 
basis of the emerging of events and the subjective realisation of traces of these 
events. Truths are happening in the world, but are also exceptions in relation 
to the logics of these worlds, something that introduces a new arrangement of 
the given transcendental setting of the world. For our topic, however, the most 
important thing is that the whole attitude of the world towards death and life 
can be measured exclusively in relation to the eternal truths and their immor-
tal subjective representatives. Paradoxically, it is only in the context of eterni-
31 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 269.
32 Ibid., p. 270.
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magdalena germek 
ty and immortality that one can understand the concept of death. Within the 
framework of his theory of truths and subjects, Badiou offers concepts that en-
able us to think the anatomy of the world, such as resurrection, the body, and 
the organs of the body.
The Anatomy of the World
We demonstrated the concept of the world based on its topology, where we per-
ceived the world more as a kind of unique topological network. By introducing 
the concept of subject and truth, we can add to the world a dimension of life, en-
riched by the concepts of body, organs, life, new birth, resurrection, death, mor-
tifying drives, corpse, and dying. Thus, we are getting to the field of the anat-
omy of the world. The place for anatomy is exactly where the creation of truth 
and subjective invention are. As Badiou mentions in Logics of Worlds, Galois’s 
mathematical discoveries in the field of algebra and Bourbaki’s monumental 
mathematical treatise are inventions which are “more akin to an anatomy of the 
mathematical body than to a dynamics of its creation.”33 At the same time, Badi-
ou does not persist with the word “anatomy”, but instead subsumes the entire 
theory of bodies under the signifier of physics. 
Badiou makes a systematic classification by which mathematics is ontology (a 
general theory of being), mathematical logic is phenomenology (a general theo-
ry of being-there) and physics covers the doctrine of truths and the general the-
ory of change.34 In a narrower sense, physics is a theory of the body that retro-
actively makes sense of the metaphysics Badiou introduces at the start of Logics 
of Worlds – the formal theory of the subject-without-object (without a body). In 
his “physics”, Badiou points to the processes of the incorporation of subjective 
formalisms in the way that a body “is this very singular type of object suited to 
serve as a support for a subjective formalism, and therefore to constitute, in a 
world, the agent of a possible truth.”35 We must add, however, that by using the 
word physics, Badiou intends to simultaneously distance himself from biology. 
Even though Badiou speaks of the body as an organicity and devotes the last 
33 Ibid., p. 472.
34 Badiou, Alain, The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School 2012, D. 
Rousselle (ed.), New York and Dresden, Atropos Press, 2013, pp. 45–46.
35 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 451.
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the anatomy of the world
chapter of his Logics to an analysis of the category of life, he nonetheless avoids 
defining biology as the main signifier of his theory of the body. At first sight, 
biology might seem to be more appropriate than physics, especially if one con-
siders that modern biological discourse, in particular the branch of molecular 
biology of Jacques Monod and François Jacob, is explicitly critical of all forms of 
vitalism and animism, which are part of “the anthropocentric illusion”36 of the 
science of life, thus compromising the scientific development of biology. The 
new science of life strives to set itself free from all the theological assumptions, 
the categories of the creationist force, and the elan vital. It perceives life as a log-
ic that develops through random mutations and offers an anti-humanistic idea 
of life that would probably adhere well to Foucault’s paradigm of the “death 
of man” and Badiou’s radically anti-vitalistic idea of “in-humanism” from The 
Century.37 Yet, Badiou chooses physics and not biology, because biology is a dis-
course strongly exposed to ideologisation.38 Badiou discusses this in the preface 
to Logics, wherein he denotes democratic materialism as a bio-materialism or 
a materialism of life. The equation “existence = individual = body”39 applies in 
bio-materialism, assuming a “natural belief” in the human “bare nature”, in 
the “natural law”, or some kind of a “biologised legality” as the carrier of rights. 
Badiou’s view of the ideology of “bare human nature” is strikingly illustrated by 
the following citation from his Ethics:
Considered in terms of its mere nature alone, the human animal must be lumped 
in the same category as its biological companions. This systematic killer pursues, 
in the giant ant hills he constructs, interests of survival and satisfaction neither 
more nor less estimable than those of moles or tiger beetles. He has shown him-
self to be the most wily of animals, the most patient, the most obstinately dedicat-
ed to the cruel desires of his own power. Above all, he has succeeded in harness-
36 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biol-
ogy, trans. A. Wainhouse, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, p. 41.
37 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. A. Toscano, Cambridge, Polity, 2007, p. 178.
38 This ideologisation can take place within the discourse of biologists itself, as Althusser 
directly demonstrated with the example of the discourse of the mentioned molecular biol-
ogist Jacques Monod. Cf. Louis Althusser, “Appendix: On Jacques Monod”, in L. Althusser, 
Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays, London and 
New York, Verso, 1990, pp. 145–166.
39 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 2.
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magdalena germek 
ing to the service of his mortal life his own peculiar ability – his ability to take up 
a position along the course of truths such that he acquires an Immortal aspect.40
The last sentence of the cited paragraph clearly expresses Badiou’s position re-
garding the relation of life and death. Life is not so much opposed to the catego-
ry of death as it is to the category of survival. A true life strives for truths, while 
survival is an ideological axiom of modern times, which is concerned only with 
the existence of body and languages, excluding any idea about the existence 
of eternal and universal truths. When Badiou, in the conclusion of his Logics, 
asks what it means to live a true life, he is asking about the kind of life that a 
human can live as a subject “participating in Immortality” and not as a human 
animal. Already in Being and Event, Badiou sets the thesis that nature as such 
does not exist (only natural situations exist), which also means that there is no 
human nature. The ruling ideology of bio-materialism, on the contrary, insists 
on the fragility of our nature, making of mortality a principal value and of life 
the central category of bio-ethics. “The conjunction of ‘ethics’ and ‘bio’ is in 
itself threatening”41 and leads to the proliferation of different “bio-discourses” 
that duplicate the category of life into the bio(s)-life. This fascination with con-
trolling the mortality of life is nothing but a death wish or the death drive itself, 
resulting in different forms of mortifying survival.42 The alternative is to insist on 
the category of life that is not put under the signifier of bios, but rather under the 
signifier of eidos, the idea: “Against this abolition of life-thought, philosophy 
declares that to live is to act so that there is no longer any distinction between 
life and Idea.”43 It means that we subjectify ourselves under the idea of the exist-
ence of truths through the form of a faithful subject that eliminates mortifying 
impulses and pursues truths.
Whether the world is alive or dead depends on the forms of subjectivity, which 
are the bearers of the realisation and materialisation of truths in the world. The 
life and death of the world refer to the ability of the subject to act as a support of 
a certain process of truth. There are three forms of subjectivity (or three subject 
“formulas”) that Badiou defines as the faithful, the reactive, and the obscure. 
40 Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward, London 
and New York, Verso, 2012, EPUB, Chapter 5, n. p.
41 Ibid., Chapter 3, n. p.
42 Cf. Badiou, “Conclusion: What is it to Live?”, in Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, pp. 507–514.
43 Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 14.
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the anatomy of the world
Regardless of its form of subjectivity, the subject always has an active relation to 
truth, even when it is determined to act against it. We will say, therefore, that the 
subject is an active form of the production or rejection of truth. Only the faithful 
subject works in the direction of the active production and realisation of truth. 
The reactive and obscure subjects work against life lived in the name of a truth. 
The problem is that when the faithful subject is constituted as bringing a world 
to life, the reactive and obscure subjects already act towards the mortification of 
this world. This brings us to Badiou’s main point, namely: “we should note that 
the contemporaneousness of a figure of the reactive or obscure type depends on 
the minimal production of a present by a faithful figure. From a subjective point 
of view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because 
there is revolution that there is reaction.”44 Reaction is always a re-action to the 
revolution: “the denial of the present supposes its production, and its occulta-
tion supposes a formula of denial.”45 A political revolution, for example, is not 
simply a re-action against social oppression, but is first of all the production of 
a new political form, generating an uprising of the reactive and obscure spirits. 
Science provides good examples of how emerging new scientific theories can 
provoke extremely oppressing reactions, and long-term struggle is sometimes 
needed to establish new scientific perspectives and matrices.
It is the same with the concept of the world. The world is neither alive nor dead, 
if there is no subjectivity to think it, perceive it, feel it. When reflecting on the 20th 
century, Badiou identifies the subjectivity of the century exactly with the way 
the century understood and thought itself. How it was thought is revealed by 
examples from science, politics, and art, which are the four “truth procedures” 
according to Badiou’s philosophy. Therefore, we have to be within the domain of 
a truth procedure in action to peek into the anatomy of the world – in this case, 
to be able to register that the letter of science murdered the world. But contrary 
to what might be expected, this truth procedure is not necessarily (only) science; 
we have also found an example of this in Rembrandt’s masterpiece.
Returning to the Rembrandt’s canvas, we can see the implicit reaction of the 
artist’s subjectivity to the world of science. By skilfully using the chiaroscuro 
painting technique (the use of strong contrasts between light and shade), Rem-
44 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 62.
45 Ibid., p. 63.
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magdalena germek 
brandt created a special light that radiates from the dead man’s body. The med-
ical observers are presented in dark clothing, blending in with the shadow of 
the background, while the corpse has a spiritual light.46 Here, we can observe 
how Rembrandt resolves the so-called “Rembrandt’s dilemma”. Rembrandt was 
a religious man, yet he portrayed a dissection of a dead man’s arm. The Catholic 
church had condemned autopsy practices, since the resurrection principle re-
quired the burial of intact bodies. For this reason, Leonardo da Vinci was forced 
to dissect human bodies in secret. On the other hand, dissection was not only a 
common practice, but a public spectacle in Protestant Holland. The resolution 
of “Rembrandt’s dilemma” is that Rembrandt had decided to paint the medical 
staff in dark nuances and the corpse in a shiny light. According to the tradition 
of painting in Holland, dark symbolised spiritual blindness and white symbol-
ised purity. It is, therefore, telling that Rembrandt assigned light and holy pu-
rity to the corpse, while covering the representatives of science with darkness 
and spiritual blindness.47 The corpse was that of Aris Kindt (an alias for Adriaan 
Adriaanszoon), who had spent his life as a criminal and also ended like one – 
he was executed for robbery. The X-ray analysis of Rembrandt’s painting reveals 
that the right arm of the corpse was partially amputated at first. Legal practice 
in the 17th century sometimes demanded the amputation of limbs prior to execu-
tion, which may be the reason why Rembrandt painted the arm as amputated.48 
However, in the final version of the painting, the entire arm is painted, pointing 
us again to the possible interpretation that the artist was struck by the fate of 
the executed. Adriaan Adriaanszoon is presented in the light of and with the 
affection of the artist. He is a representative of those members of society that 
are usually attributed a hidden, minimised role of appearing and visibility, such 
as outcasts, tramps, criminals, and underprivileged individuals. It seems that 
Adriaan Adriaanszoon is not simply an object of anatomy, but a subject, a car-
rier of a symbolic connection very well known in Christianity: the connection 
(made visible only in death) between Jesus and the criminals executed along-
side him on Golgotha.
46 Below, we refer again to the analysis of Adéla Janíčková, “Surgeon’s hands in Vesalius’s 
portraits and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp”.
47 Ibid.
48 Ijpma, et al., “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Painted by Rembrandt in 1632”, p. 
1060.
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the anatomy of the world
Let us dwell for a few more moments in the 17th century and look for anoth-
er example in art. The world has died is a shocking thought announced by the 
poem suggestively entitled The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World (1611) 
by the English poet John Donne. Written for Donne’s patron Sir Robert Drury, 
the poem talks about the death of Drury’s fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth. 
What the poem shows is not simply the death of a young person, but the death 
of the world itself. The world dies with Elizabeth. The world collapses. Without 
her, the soul of the world, the world falls apart. The rest of the residents of the 
world act indifferently, as if nothing happened. But something did happen. And 
if there is no one to notice it, the world will be the one to grieve.49 The world will 
become a subject of love that is grieving, collapsing, and dying.
But this world is also the old world, which is now changing religiously, meta-
physically, and politically. New scientific and philosophical concepts are aris-
ing and bringing radically new perspectives of the universe itself. According to 
Alexandre Koyré, the 17th century brought about new concepts of the world; the 
idea of the world as a closed and harmonically organised totality was replaced 
by the modern idea of openness and the infinitisation of the universe. The new 
astronomy gradually replaced the geocentric concepts with heliocentric ones, a 
new scientific matrix was being born, arising from the geometrisation of space, 
the uniformity of the world, and the mathematisation of nature. These process-
es were not concurrent. The mixing of the old and new concept of the world had 
sparked different ambivalences and imaginaries. It is this tension that Donne’s 
poem speaks of in the art medium. The poet feels that the old world is chang-
ing and slowly dying, and something new is coming. Protestantism is coming 
to England; the old dogmas in science are collapsing, new philosophies and 
concepts of the world are emerging. The poet is overwhelmed by ambivalent 
feelings, by curiosity and hope, by confusion, fear, and doubt about what is 
49 “This world, in that great earthquake languished; / For in a common bath of tears it bled, 
/ Which drew the strongest vital spirits out; / But succour’d then with a perplexed doubt, 
/ Whether the world did lose, or gain in this / (Because, since now no other way there is / 
But goodness, to see her, whom all would see, / All must endeavour to be good as she). / 
This great consumption to a fever turned, / And so the world had fits: it joyed, it mourned; 
/ And as men think that agues physic are, / And th’ague being spent, give over care, / So 
thou, sick World, mistak’st thyself to be / Well, when alas, thou’rt in a lethargy.” John 
Donne, “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World”, in The Complete Poems of John 
Donne, R. Robbins (ed.), London and New York, Routledge, 2013, EPUB, n. p.
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magdalena germek 
coming. All forms of subjectivity are present: Should we greet something new, 
even if we have no knowledge about what it will bring, or preserve at any price 
what is already known to us, and fight the novelty or even to deny it? The new 
philosophies (of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler) bring something more than 
just interesting ideas. They are the beginning of something that will develop in 
a dominant paradigm of the world with Newton – an entirely different picture 
of the world from an integral, holistic, and teleological paradigm. Donne’s An 
Anatomy of the World is perhaps a reaction to the coming analytical, rationalist, 
dissectional, anatomically-scientific view of the world, which was also a subject 
of Hegel’s critique.
Both artistic examples, Donne’s poem and Rembrandt’s painting, point to two 
views of the world: the objective and the subjective. On one side, there is the 
cold, calculative, objective world of science; on the other, there is the artistic, 
religious, existentialist, and subjective experience of death, world, life. From 
the perspective of the artistic truth procedure, scientific discoveries may not be 
recognised as creating genuine and subjective productions, but are rather felt as 
invasive, objective mechanisms of the approaching inevitability that disregards 
the living and dying to which a work of art can react emotionally and melanchol-
ically. From this perspective, science is perceived to be on the side of the cold, 
external world, and art as the carrier and representative of internal, subjective, 
existential values. Science creates a dead world, while art is concerned with life.
However, looking at this through the prism of Badiou’s philosophy, we can reject 
this dualism as superficial. We saw that due to its phenomenological-topolog-
ical constitution, the world is simply an objective place that disregards death 
and perceives it as an existential value. Instead of one world, it would be correct 
to talk about an infinite number of worlds. These worlds can be understood in 
terms of cold, deadening objectivity. They are indeed objective as long as there 
are no events, no truths, and consequently no subjects appearing in them. But 
when an event happens, which can be an event of love, politics, science, or art 
(which Badiou considers to be truth procedures), the site of the given world 
transforms into an eventual site, into a place where something radical can hap-
pen. Whether something revolutionary will actually happen (which can only be 
revealed retroactively) depends on the forms of subjectivity that will either faith-
fully address and affirm the event in the production of a new form of a concrete 
truth, or deny and prevent the processes of truth from realising it. If the reac-
155
the anatomy of the world
tive and obscure subject forms win, we get a mortifying world – a corpse of the 
world. On the contrary, with the active production of the event-emerging truth, 
a new world of a given truth procedure will emerge and arise. This means that 
the life and death of the world can only be followed in relation to the appearing 
of the concrete truth procedure.
In this text we have discussed the concept of the world – by aid of examples from 
Rembrandt and Donne – in the context of the artistic truth procedure, which 
brought us to the scientific world of anatomy. Without here going into the com-
plex relation among individual truth procedures,50 we can draw the conclusion 
that in the case of Rembrandt and Donne, what is at stake are not two distinct 
worlds of two separate truth procedures – the scientific and artistic – understood 
along the opposition of dead and alive, but rather that of one world of art, sub-
jectively realised in a dynamic range of artistic critique, uncertainty, enthusiasm, 
resistance, curiosity, and compassion. From the perspective of art (and Hegel’s 
philosophy), the world according to the model of (anatomical) science can be 
understood as a corpse; but we must note that from the perspective of science 
this is not an inevitable conclusion. According to Badiou’s doctrine of truths, an 
event is always localised and refers to a specific truth procedure; meaning that 
what is an event in one truth procedure is not necessarily an event in another. 
If we were to delve deeper into the concrete procedure of scientific production, 
we might be able to follow the birth of new scientific theories that the faithful 
subjects of scientific truth advocate and thereby realise the birth of new scientific 
worlds. In this respect, what becomes a dead letter of science is not necessarily 
a corpse, a product of the mortifying production of reactive or obscure subjects, 
but something that comes alive exactly through the letter of science.
50 We can thus note that one must look at truth procedures through the autonomy of their 
own subjective production. Every true procedure is autonomous in its field, which means 
that, for example, science cannot annihilate the possibility of the production of truth in 
the field of art or vice versa. Further analysis would definitely require us to develop this 
point more precisely and to concretely check the possibility that the production of the new 
and universal of certain truth procedures can provoke reactive and obscure subjectivities 
of other truth procedures. 
156
magdalena germek 
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