This sex Which Is Not One Women on the Market en only fulfill this role by relinquishing their right to speech and changes in general-might lead them to offer a new critique of even to animality. No longer in the natural order, not yet in the the political economy. A critique that would no longer avoid that social order that they nonetheless maintain, women are the of discourse, and more generally of the symbolic system, in which it is symptom of the exploitation of individuals by a society that realized. Which would lead to interpreting in a different way the remunerates them only partially, or even not at all, for their impact of symbolic social labor in the analysis of relations of ork. " Unless subordination to a system that utilizes you and production. oppresses you should be considered as sufficient compensa- or, without the exploitation of women, what would be Unless the fact that women are branded with the come of the social order? What modifications would it underg proper name-of the"father"-should be viewed as the sym- if women left behind their condition as commodities-subject bolic payment awarded them for sustaining the social order to being produced, consumed, valorized, circulated, and so on with their bodies? But by submitting womens bodies to a general equivalent, by men alone-and took part in elaborating and carryins ao g, by locratic"models that have the force of law today, but by so- to a transcendent, super-natural value, men have drawn the cializing in a different way the relation to nature, matter,the social structure into an ever greater process of abstraction,so body, language, and desire the point where they themselves are produced in it as pure concepts: having surmounted all their "perceptible"qualities and individual differences, they The power of this practical finally reduced to the av age productivity of their labor. economy of the meta-physical comes from the fact that" physi- logical"energy is transformed into abstract value without the mediation of an intelligible elaboration. No individual subject an be credited any longer with bringing about this transforma- tion. It is only after the fact that the subject might possibly be able to analyze his determination as such by the social structure. And even then it is not certain that his love of gold would not make him give up everything else before he would renounce the cult of this fetish. The saver thus sacrifices to this fetish all the penchants of his flesh. No one takes the gospel of renunciation more seriously than he Fortunately-if we may say so-women/commodities would remain, as simple"objects"of transaction among men Their situation of specific exploitation in exchange opera tions-sexual exchange, and economic, social, and cultural ex-