This Sex which Is not One Women on the market provided the standard of value for commodities, and into com- of her body-although her body constitutes the material sup- modity-objects that ensured the circulation of exchange with- port of that price out participating in it as subjects. But when women are exchanged, womans body must be eated as an abstraction. The exchange operation cannot take place in terms of some intrinsic, immanent value of the com- modity. It can only come about when two objects-two wom en-are in a relation of equality with a third term that is neither Let us now reconsider a few points in Marx's analysis of the one nor the other. It is thus not as "women"that they are value that seem to describe the social status of women xchange, but as women reduced to some common feature- their current price in gold, or phalluses-and of which they Wealth amounts to a subordination of the use of things to would represent a plus or minus quantity. Not a plus or a minu their accumulation. Then would the way women are used matter of feminine qualities, obviously. Since these qualities are aba less than their number? The possession of a woman is certainly doned in the long run to the needs of the consumer, woman h indispensable to man for the reproductive use value that she value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a represents; but what he desires is to have them all. To"accu- product of nulate" them, to be able to count off his conquests, seductions On this basis, each one looks exactly like every other. They possessions, both sequentially and cumulatively, as measure or all have the same phantom-like reality. Metamorphosed standard(s) identical sublimations, samples of the same indistinguishable All but one? For if the series could be closed, value might work, all these objects now manifest just one thing, namely well lie, as Marx says, in the relation among them rather than in that in their production a force of human labor has been ex- the relation, to a standard that remains external to them- pended, that labor has accumulated in them. In their role as whether gold or phallus crystals of that common social substance, they are deemed to The use made of women is thus of less value than their appro- priation one by one. And their usefulness"is not what counts the most. Womans price is not determined by the"properties' As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value. "They manifest th ves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form”(p.55) WiL lin ge o i rede rick ing s, erer. Eist: ur nn(New York But "the reality of the value of commodities differs in this ept the question, t be addressed also, and in the first respect from Dame Quickly, that we dont know where to have it'(ibid. ).Woman, object of exchange, differs from worman, to Marx, determine the relation of form to matter by analogy with etween masculine and feminine? ro use value, in that one doesn't know how to take (hold of her, for between the sexes would amount instead, then, to going back since "the value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter 175
This sex which is not one Women on the market enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single com- labor. The mirror that envelops and paralyzes the com- modity, by itself, as we will. Yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it"(ibid. ) The value of a specularizes, speculates (on)mans "labor. "Com omen,are a mirror of value of and for man. In order to woman always escapes: black continent, hole in the symbolic Ich, they give up their bodies to men as the support breach in discourse... It is only in the operation of exchange ing material of specularization, of speculation. They yield to among women that something of this-something enigmatic to be surecan be felt. Woman thus has value only in that she him their natural and social value as a locus of imprints, marks, of his be exchanged In the passage from one to the other, something else finally exists beside the possible utility of the"coarseness Commodities among themselves are thus not equal, nor of her body. But this value is not found, is not recaptured, in alike, nor different, They only become so when they are com- her. It is only her measurement against a third term that re- pared by and for man. And the prosopopoeia of the relation of mains external to her, and that makes it possible to compare her commodities among themselves is a projection through which pro- with another woman, that permits her to have a relation to ducers-exchangers make them reenact before their eyes their foreign to both. ty in terms of an equivalence that remains another commodit operations of specula(riza tion, Forgetting that in order to re- flect(oneself), to speculate(oneself), it is necessary to be a Womenl-as-commodities are thus subject to a schism that divides subject, and that matter can serve as a support for speculation them into the categories of usefulness and exchange value; into but cannot itself speculate in any wa matter-body and an envelope that is precious but impenetrable. starting with the simplest relation of equivalence be ungraspable, and not susceptible to appropriation by women tween commodities, starting with the possible exchange of hemselves; into private use and social use women, the entire enigma of the money form-of the phallic function-is implied. That is, the appropriation-disappropria- In order to have a relative value, a commodity has to be con tion by man, for man, of nature and its productive forces, fronted with another commodity that serves as its equivalent insofar as a certain mirror now divides and travesties both Its value is never found to lie within itself. And the fact that it is nature and labor. Man endows the commodities he produces worth more or less is not its own doing but comes from that to with a narcissism that blurs the seriousness of utility, of use which it may be equivalent. Its value is transcendent to itsel Desire as soon as there is excha perverts"need. But that perversion will be attributed to commodities and to their al- In other words, for the commodity there is no mirror that copies it so leged relations. Whereas they can have no relationships except that it may be at once itself and its"own"reflection. One com from the perspective of speculating third partic felloay cannot be mirrored in another, as man is mirrored in his n. For when we are dealing with commodities the The economy of exchange-of desireis man's business For two self-same, mirrored, is not"its"own likeness, contains noth reasons: the exchange takes place between masculine subjects value added to the body of the commodity of its properties, its qualities, its"skin and hair ""The likeness and it requires a here is only a measure expressing the fabricated character of the supplement which gives it a valuable form. That supplement will be found, Marx writes, in another commodity, whose commodity, its trans-formation by mans(social, symbolic value becomes, from that point on, a standard of value 177