They are both what I would call "serious" writers. If either employs irony, it is not evident at all. Using literary modes in philosophical exposition is certainly confusing and, somehow, needs explicit justification on the reader's part or the reader simply has no way to truly understand in the simple-minded sense of the scholar or philosopher. It is some of the time easy to identify the one and sometimes the other, but both in myself and in real scholars I notice I/they carefully segregate the two into separate and therefore safe compartments. Although what you said about Kierkegaard was true, and even if one questions the closet-homosexual motivation which is all I can do because there are no facts I can bring forward, that he was for certain being in some sense dishonest. He might consider himself honest and through that self-belief deceive me into believing he is honest, but you were correct in your statement that such motivations are not sufficient justification for believing in Christianity even if Kierkegaard makes it his private Christianity. Therefore, in his very torturous employment of mirroring in his authorships and his double and maybe triple irony, 1) he does show the complex moves my which one can confuse oneself and others, but 2) in the end really have nothing at all to communicate to others worthwhile. However brilliant a writer and thinker one is, why write if you are not trying to communicate something true even if it is just to myself as, to be honest, is very often what I do. But I also want some kind of external delineation, setting up of real boundaries, to truly discover if what I am writing is just fantasy or really has a point. And "having a point" here, no matter how "self-sufficient" and purely internal one wants to be, is not determined by me but by "Other" people, in this case you. With you, even if I disagree, I find it a disagreement with substance.

But let us get back to the philosophers that know they are being ironical and at least think they have something to say, and really do have a great deal to offer along the way, like Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and philosophical novelists like Thomas Mann and Thomas Pynchon. With Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to be fully honest, I think they are far too involved with their personal concerns, which they get thoroughly confused with their "message." Thomas Mann actually employs irony with the same external message as Jean Genet, i. e. that the artist/philosopher is a thief and a cheat. But even so, he does this as an artistic "message," and simply presenting this baldly accomplishes nothing other than trivializing literature and philosophy. Thomas Pynchon does something far more important in that he shows the 'common' person's tendency to discover conspiracies everywhere from hilariously silly to world-historical and metaphysical I think does validly show there is a motive, a motive, of paranoia in such all-inclusive, systematic thinking, that it is away to control the existent but unacknowledged conspiracy of external reality against me. However, that gives far too much credit to the intelligence and dedicated motivation of "external reality". Rather, I think MacBeth was right: "It is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," which is also, I think, what Pynchon is getting at. That leaves Plato.

I was taken to task once for assuming too blithely that Plato did not have a definite metaphysical system he believed in because I had ceased to pay attention to what were supposedly his straightforward statements about the nature of reality. But in numerous different ways he does qualify all his statements and set himself at a distance from him, but he never does this qualifying as a principle, which both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche explicitly do. He does state that the Ideas are eternal and ultimate reality, he does state that the ground of our understanding is a remembrance and not simply a learning from experience as in Aristotle, that there is such a thing as the "Good' towards which everything strives toward which Aristotle also has--but it is far more down to earth, practical, even a matter of physics, not metaphysics. This may be a clue in itself. The first mover in Aristotle, the unmoved mover that moves others through their love of it, is a matter of physics, not theology, as both Richard Bodeus and Philoponus (a Christian!) have pointed out. In the passage of METAPHYSICS, Bk. XII (lambda) in which he talks about the unmoved mover, the word "God" does not intrude. He does bring in "God" in the next paragraph, but the language is still the same. "God" is just a motivational cause, "God" is thought itself "thinking itself" as "an object of thought" "so that thought and the object of thought are the same" (1072b20-22):

For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i. e. the substance, is thought, And it is active when it possesses its object. Therefore the later rather than the former is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's essential actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. (1072b22-31)

And here the passage abruptly ends. It sounds suspicious. The text of the chapter before does not mention God. The text afterwards does not mention God. And the text itself? It literally says that God is "the object of thought," that God is "thought", i. e., "the divine element which thought seems to contain." Instead of 'proving' God exists, Aristotle shows, not the objective existence, but the value, the motivation toward God as SOLELY being "in that state we sometimes are." And the whole rest of the passage speaks in a completely different language, a language not found anywhere else in the chapter (I have not researched this enough), a language not in the slightest justified by what went before: the language of Christian theologians! God is not even an intellectual concept that we strive toward, but is a state of being we can temporarily obtain! There is no actual need, insofar as that goes, for the objective existence of God at all! And the language that follows is distorted, obviously changing God from being state of man's existence to absurdly becoming a state of experience that exists outside of man which even Aristotle would object to on the same grounds as I would: How can you rationally know an "Other's" experience? How could Aristotle have created such a crude logical blunder?

If one accepts the passage as all genuine, then Aristotle is metaphysical and not phenomenological, based wholly on maintaining the consistency of abstract thought without actually needing to confirm any of it by experience, instead of, as I said, experience always comes first in Aristotle, and then thought secondarily, and of secondary importance. If experience is of primary importance in Aristotle, then all of Aristotle's equivocations can possibly be explained because, when translated into abstract logical language, experience seems to be implying equivocal meanings. So with Aristotle trying to be a serious, honest, straight-forward philosopher based primarily on experience and not using abstract logic as primary arbiter, i. e. what is is and whether you can explain it properly or not. The equivocations are what he discovers at hand, not something syllogistically deduced. Therefore he seems to be saying different things at the same time not because he is employing irony but because he is honestly trying to write in syntactical language something that came from that which is not words and not syntactical at all.

Therefore Aristotle is a serious writer, i. e. he is trying to do something difficult in a straight-forward fashion. There is no irony even if Plato was his teacher. It is the same with Jean Genet. But Jean Genet is deliberately NOT being honest but deliberately devious and deceptive. However, they are both straightforward. They are not indulging in literary devices like Jacques Derrida (I hope you have noticed that I do not like the man even as a philosopher!) but both go straight to the heart--Aristotle to show the truth of the matter, Genet to kill it, i. e. the heart, "the truth of the matter," your life and happiness. Genet's writing is an act of thievery simply for the sake of stealing from others. He was, till the day he died, a habitual petty thief. He stole from those who 'sympathized' with him (like Giacommetti), and he sensed put themselves on a higher moral plain and therefore condescended to him and which therefore applies to gay liberationists also, and only dealt honestly--as far as I know--with those in the same state of abjection they could not and would not get out of because they saw their misery as the real truth of things like American Blacks and the Palestinians. That is why 'real' blacks hold gangsters (gangster rap), drug-dealers (the Super-Fly movie series), and cop-killers (one or two of the rappers) as their ideals. There was a scene in the movie HAMBURGER HILL that struck me as totally exemplifying black nihilism (which of course social programs and welfare can do nothing for) when the blacks in the unit (just the blacks) get together and go through a hand-slapping ritual before battle, saying, "It don't mean nothing, it don't mean nothing at all." "Hamburger Hill" actually happened in Viet-nam, really was a bloody fiasco, and had no military purpose whatsoever. The scene was from a work of imagination, but struck me as completely on point--and not just for blacks. Recently a minister from Sharon's cabinet interviewed personally some failed suicide-bombers in prison. He said the depth of their despair overwhelmed him. That is another group of people money and social programs will never help. Americans do not understand in the slightest either the meaning or depth of nihilism they have loosed on the rest of the world. That we "just had to do it" for whatever reason doesn't mean shit when confronted with such a phenomenon that is so in love with violence and death. As I have said before, you cannot threaten a person who really does not care about death in any way. And this is the kind of people Genet, the serious writer like Aristotle, loved. As far as he was concerned, the rest of us can go fuck ourselves. Money is usually the truest arbiter of values I have found with very rare exceptions. I certainly love money. But Genet treated his publishers who made him 'rich' like a pip treats his whore in public! In front of all his employees! THE MOST ULTIMATE INSULT! Sometimes my sanity starts to leave me at work and I start to say . . . but I don't have the guts and usually take it out on someone weaker politically than even I am .