“The theater of values is a theater of shadows, and true Leftists should burn it to the ground.” - Antigram

Needless to say, this statement is a statement in which certain things are, ahem, valorised over others - specifically truth and the passion of the real, over the groundless shadow-play of moralising right-wing dramaturgy. It seems odd to me that Daniel should invoke Nietzsche in this connection - why bother at all with the transvaluation of values, when you can just move directly to the concrete as he seems to suggest? In other words, I don’t think the big door here with the flashing neon “exit” sign over it is a real exit; a quick detour round a labyrinth of badly-lit corridors smelling of disinfectant, and you’re back in the theatre again…

I suspect the real difference between “left” and “right” here has to do with the place of values in a larger schema; and Daniel’s quite right to say that for Freud and Nietzsche they form part of a circuit connecting the world of material forces with itself, rather than standing apart from that world and offering a set of timeless criteria with which to judge its contents. But this is why Badiou speaks of the logics of worlds: a world is not simply a blind dissemination of existents, but a relational order equipped with an array (OK, a lattice…) of truth values. These values are not only immanent, but local to the particular world they organize. (The defining quality of a truth, as opposed to a truth-value, is then its eternity or non-locality).

For the “family values” fundamentalist, “family” values literally are truth-values: they guarantee the coherency of the social order, to the extent that without them there is simply chaos: what is left if such values are directly liquidated is not the “concrete” world of material relations that was really always there, but a world in which no relationship whatsoever is thinkable. Now the truth, if one may say this, of what we might call the Stonewall event is that certain existents appear (“we’re here”) which are organized by other truth-values (“we’re queer”), and that this appearance does not result in a chaotic plunge into the abyss, but rather the composition of a new body (“get used to it”).

It is clear that the political sequence of queer activism is not reducible to a contest on the “terrain of values”, since it involves a truth which cannot be reduced to a set of truth-values (and this finally is why the equivocations of the Anglican church on the matter are so frustrating, since they presuppose precisely this reduction: after all, all that is the matter is that your values are different from mine, we must seek to understand each other and find a way to work things out…). Nevertheless, the sequence does call for, and pass through, a transvaluation of values (an ongoing desedimentation and dissemination of the value of “kinship”, for example); in no sense does it immediately disclose the finality of a “concrete” sexuality that had merely been obscured by a miasma of prudery and incense.