"Badiou reaffirms his commitment to Maoism..." in a "Lecture-Performance", sponsored by a bohemian luxury boutique in Manhattan.
The boutique owner sees the irony even if the audience doesn't.

repeats The seriousness of art and the seriousness of the academy.


Chris Rock is an intelligent and sophisticated observer of the world; it's fitting he wrote his remake of Love in the Afternoon with Louis C.K. Anglo-American culture doesn't have a great tradition of high art, and cultures that do don't have a great tradition of democracy. Our good artists learn from high culture by discovering it, precisely because our academy, whatever pretensions it may have to defending it, considers all art unserious. Rock is in the tradition is this sense of Eastwood and Tarantino, the opposite of von Trier, though they meet in the middle as makers of serious popular art, or popular serious art.

Interesting to watch Spiral, (Engrenages) for its observations/criticism/defense of the French inquisitorial system of justice, as opposed to the Anglo-American adversarial system. Characters' arguments for high moral purpose, described by the camera to show both its strengths and limits, have the air of the Church, and the innocence not of the young but specifically of young priests, younger sons from good families. Badiou is a representative of that tradition in decay.

The Anglo-American model of philosophy is less religious but also incapable of irony, which is why the answer to French philosophs is not Oxbridge pedants but playwrights and comedians. The makers of Engrenages are more honest than Badiou, just as the makers of The Wire and Breaking Bad are more honest than partisans of Rawls.

The above is all repeats, old wine in new bottles. Philosophers are rationalists; comedians are empiricists. Better late than never, comedians get their own tag.

Rock with Frank Rich. A theater critic and a comedian, a couple of intelligent, bourgeois, non-leftists.

This post above contradicts the ending of the previous one.