This sex which Is Not One Women on the market against a standard, so it is with women. Distinguished, transcend it. They are not even"conscious"of it. The symbolic separated,classified as like and unlike, according to system that cuts them in two this way is in no way appropriate they have been judged exchangeable. In themselves, to them. In them,"semblance"remains external, foreign to themselves, they are amorphous and confused: natural body, nature. Socially, they are"objects"for and among men and maternal body, doubtless useful to the consumer, but without furthermore they cannot do anything but mimic a"language' any possible identity or communicable value, hat they have not produced; naturally, they remain amorphous, suffering from drives without any possible representatives or or l st as commodities, despite their resistance, become more representations. For them, the transformation of the natural ss autonomous repositories for the value of human work, into the social does not take place, except to the extent that the so, as mirrors of and for man, women more or less unwittingly function as components of private property, or as commoditie come to represent the danger of a disappropriation of masculine wer: the phallic mirage Characteristics of this social order just as a commodity finds the expression of its value in an This type of social system can be interpreted as the practical equivalent--in the last analysis, a general one-that necessarily realization of the meta-physical. As the practical destiny of the meta- emains external to it, so woman derives her price from her physical, it would also represent its most fully realized form. Oper- relation to the male sex. constituted as a transcendental value. ating in such a way, moreover, that subjects themselves, being he phallus. And indeed the enigma of"value"lies in the most implicated in it through and through, being produced in it as elementary relation among commodities. Among women. For, concepts, would lack the means to analyze it. Except in an after uprooted from their "nature, ' they no longer relate to each the-fact way whose delays are yet to be fully measured other except in terms of what they represent in mens desire, nd according to the"forms"that this imposes upon them This practical realization of the meta-physical has as its Among themselves, they are separated by his speculations founding operation the appropriation of woman's body by the father or his substitutes. It is marked by womens submission to This means that the division of labor"-sexual labor in par a system of general equivalents, the proper name representing ticular--requires that woman maintain in her own body the the father's monopoly of power. It is from this standardization material substratum of the object of desire, but that she herself that women receive their value, as they pass from the state of never have access to desire. The economy of desire-of e nature to the status of social object. This trans-formation of change-is man's business. And that economy subjects women women's bodies into use values and exchange values inaugu- to a schism that is necessary to symbolic operations: red rates the symbolic order. But that order depends upo n a hear blood/semblance: body /value-invested envelop ure added value, Women, animals endowed with speech like ter/medium of exchange;(re)Productive nature/fabricat men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the ininity... That schism--characteristic of all speaki symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the someone will surely object-is experienced by women without symbolic is what has established the social order. Putting men iny possible profit to them. And without any way for them to in touch with each other, in relations among themselves, wom 188