“The “other” homosexual relations, masculine ones, are just as subversive, so they too are forbidden. Because they openly interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift the horizon of that law. Besides, they challenge the nature, status, and “exogamic” necessity of the product of exchange. By short-circuiting the mechanisms of commerce, might they also expose what is really at stake? Furthermore, they might lower the sublime value of the standard, the yard stick. Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual pleasure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women.
Exchanges and relationships, always among men, would thus be both required and forbidden by law. There is a price to pay for being the agents ofexchange: male subjects have to give up the possibility of serving as commodities themselves.
Thus all economic organization is homosexual. That of desire as well, even the desire for women. Woman exists only as an occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself.”
Softcover, staple-bound, b&w