>>1716242It is true that she still has the child, in relation to whom her appetite for touch, for contact, has rein, unless it is already
lost, alienated by the taboo against touching of a highly ob-
sessive civilization. Otherwise her pleasure will find, in the child, compensations for and diversions from the frustrations that she too often encounters in sexual relations per se. Thus maternity fills the gaps in a repressed female sexuality. Perhaps man and woman no longer caress each other except through that
mediation between them that the child-preferably a boy-represents? Man, identified with his son, rediscovers the pleasure of maternal fondling; woman touches herself again caressing that part ofher body: her baby-penis-ditoris.
What this entails for the amorous trio is well known. But the Oedipal interdiction seems to be a somewhat categorical and factitious law-although it does provide the means for per petuating the authoritarian discourse of fathers-when it is promulgated in a culture in which sexual relations are imprac ticable because man's desire and woman's are strangers to each other.
And in which the two desires have to try to meet through indirect means, whether the archaic one ofa sense-relation to the mother's body, or the present one ofactive or passive extension of the law of the father. These are regressive emotional behav iors, exchanges ofwords too detached from the sexual arena not to constitute an exile with respect to it: "mother" and "father"
