Ugh! I just spent over an hour typing my response and then tried to post it. The system told me I needed to log in again and so I did, and then I lost the post I had been working on. So, what follows is a much shorter and more hurried approximation of that original lost post (because now I have lost patience).
In The Creation of the World, or Globalization, Nancy distinguishes between what we might call in English globalization, which he aligns with understanding the world via a worldview or attempting to make sense of the world using representations, and world-becoming or the creation of the world, which has to do with taking the world as totality, not as something that has meaning but instead as the place where meaning happens, as that which happens. For Nancy the world is at once the space of all possible happenings and the space where the possible happens. Globalization has allowed the world to be thought, but now globalization has exhausted itself and is destroying the world (or the sense of the world as worldview). What is needed, Nancy claims, is a rethinking of the creation of the world: the world creates itself (grows) out of nothing (ex nihilo, is given by nothing, stands on nothing but itself. World-becoming is this creation out of nothing.
It could be interesting to think this contrast in relation to Red Mars, which, to me at least, is about the many failures of different systems of globalization. What we are given in Red Mars is something approximating - what? - the planetary instead of the global. What I mean is that no matter what different worldviews or understandings the first 100 try to bring to Mars, Mars continually escapes them. What we are given instead is a sense of Mars as a planet: the dramatic landscape, massive planetary weather systems, the constant attention to the planet's atmosphere and gravitational pull. This is not to say that Mars somehow escapes or thwarts human intervention or even globalization; certainly things like terraforming and the international/planetary flows of capital, people, and goods increase in scale as the novel goes on. However, it is to say that what the novel somehow offers up is the sense of the planetary, of the totality of the planet, which seems, to me, to be different somehow from the global.