This Sex Which Is Not One Women on the market his own likeness, wives, daughters, and sisters have value only in that they serve as the possibility of, and potential benefit in ganization of such societies, and the operation of the symbolic relations among men. The use of and traffic in wormen subtend system on which this organization is based-a symbolic system and uphold the reign of masculine hom(m)o-sexuality, even whose instrument and representative is the proper name: the while they maintain that hom(m)o-sexuality in speculations, name of the father, the name of God--contain in a nuclear form mirror games, identifications, and more or less rivalrous appro- the developments that Marx defines as characteristic of a cap priations, which defer its real practice. Reigning italist regime: the submission of "nature"to a "labor" on the although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played part of men who thus constitute"nature"as use value and out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and hetero- exchange value; the division of labor among private producer Whose"sociocultural endogamy excludes the, o e and hetero- exuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth work- owners who exchange their women-commodities among gs of mans relations with himself, of relati themselves, but also among producers and exploiters or ex- ploitees of the social order; the standardization of women ac that other, so foreign to the social order: woman. Exogamy cording to proper names that determine their equivalences; a doubtless requires that one leave one's family, tribe, or clan, in tendency to accumulate wealth, that is, a tendency for the rep order to make alliances. All the same, it does not tolerate mar- resentatives of the most"proper"names-the leaders-to cap riage with populations that are too far away, too far removed italie more women than the others; a progression of the social from the prevailing cultural rules.A cultural endogamy work of the symbolic toward greater and greater abstraction would thus forbid commerce with women. Men make com- and so forth merce of them, but they do not enter into any exchanges with To be sure, the means of production have evolved, new tech them. Is this perhaps all the more true because exogamy is an niques have been developed, but it does seem that as soon as the economic issue, perhaps even subtends economy as such? The father-man was assured of his reproductive power and had exchange of women as goods accompanies and stimulates marked his products with his name, that is, from the very anges of other "wealth"among of men. The econo- origin of private property and the patriarchal family, social ex- my-in both the narrow and the broad sense-that is in place in ploitation occurred. In other words, all the social regimes of our societies thus requires that women lend themselves to alie History"are based upon the exploitation of one"class"of ation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not producers,namely, women. Whose reproductive use value(re- articipate, and that men be exempt from being used and circu- productive of children and of the labor force)and whose con- lated like commodities stitution as exchange value underwrite the symbolic order as such, without any compensation in kind going to them for that work. For such sation would imply a double system of exchange, that is, a shattering of the monopolization of the proper name(and of what it signifies as appropriative power) Marx's analysis of commodities as the elementary form of capitalist wealth can thus be understood as an interpretation of Thus the social body would be redistributed into prodr subjects no longer functioning as commodities because 173