http://www.egs.edu Alain Badiou, French philosopher, mathematician and author, talking about the relationship between the finite and infinite in the context of set theory. In this lecture, Alain Badiou recapitulates the struggle between reactive classicism and reactive romanticism, new humanism, grace and immanent life and goes on to discuss set theory and the paradox of beginning with nothing in relationship to Plato, René Descartes, Georg Cantor, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze focusing on being, existence, the One, affirmation, subjectivity, the trace, the void, absolute beginning, the empty set, indeterminacy and omega. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Alain Badiou.

Alain Badiou (b. 1937, Rabat, Morocco) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, to which he later returned, to become the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Alain Badiou has also taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), and continues to do so at the Collège International de Philosophie. Badiou was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party, which was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. To this day, Badiou remains both a member of the Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), and at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a 'post-party organization' concerned with direct popular intervention in social and political issues.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, among them in English are Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2000), On Beckett (2003), Being and Event (2005), Number and Numbers (2008), The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008), Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2 (2009), Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (2009), Theory of the Subject (2009), The Communist Hypothesis (2010), and Five Lessons on Wagner (2010).