Yet after a year a new flower will bloom, rekindling the desire of all men, for a whole new year. And this is the fate of the contemporary Aphrodite. Between man and woman there is no instinctual rapport because sexuality is marked by the signifier. Thus an Other sits between them. The sexual rapport cannot be written.
Love then is the illusion for the absence of harmonic rapport between the sexes.
Man does not enjoy the body of the woman, only the body part - sexual drives go solely towards the partial object. They are imaginary signifiers whose matter is taken from the image. When we say 'the living body,' we leave aside both the symbolized body and the body image. The body affected by jouissance is neither imaginary nor symbolic, but a living one. Life is a condition of jouissance .