Alain Badiou. The Ontology of Multiplicity: Omega As Event. 2011

www.egs.edu Alain Badiou, French philosopher, mathematician and author, talking about the finite and infinite in an ontology of multiplicity. In this lecture, Alain Badiou discusses set theory, the formulas of existence and obligation, the reactionary vision in politics, and omega as a limit point and event in relationship to Plato, Georg Cantor, René Descartes, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida focusing on truth, God, the One, affirmation, void, extensionality, globality, locality, difference, succession, repetition, new worlds, memory and life. 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).