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The operation of O'Brien's conjugal dyad is cemented by tactility.  It is not possible to argue uncontrovertibly that O'Brien locks the dyad onto this one and only this one sensory modality.  She never cites in full the passage in Hegel's fragment on love concering the fusion of the lovers, the passage upon which so much rests.  It reads:

What in the first instance is most the individual's own is united into the whole in the lovers' touch and contact;  consciousness of a separate self disappears, and all distinction between the lovers is annulled. (Knox, 307)

In O'Brien's other access to the German, the touch and contact is rendered by phrasing that suggests more than a simple physical encouter.  Harris gives "in mutual contact and shared feeling" (Hegel's Development 309).  The lovers are in a state;  they are in der Berührung, in der Befühlung, in the touching and in the contacting.  The weight of the preposition is lost on O'Brien.  Her focus is the between.

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Whether O'Brien is following Knox or Harris or some mixture of both, it is possible to argue that a commodity logic is at work when O'Brien reads this tactile and affective meeting as an exchange.  As Strathern points out:

What commodity logic promotes is a perceived diversity and complexity not in relationships but in the attributes of persons as selves and agents. (Gender of the Gift 312)

This is the perfect basis for conceiving contacts as exchanges.  Relationships become a matter of swapping attributes, assembling a unity, rather than formulating interactions, being united.

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O'Brien conflates the two different products of the process.  She equates two entities:  the unity resulting from the union and the union itself.  Or rather she proceeds by excision.  She disregards Hegel's fundamental focus upon union in itself and she neglects the type of economy in which it is embedded.

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Two economies are discernable in Hegel's text.  The first is an economy of the gift in which the act of giving does not diminish the person giving.  The second is an exchange economy where each party stands to lose.  This second economy does appear in the final paragraph of the Hegelian fragment "which is devoted to proving that two individuals cannot really have common property" (Harris 310).  From this conclusion O'Brien's model of the alienated seeds takes its cue.  And the moment of touch is conceived in terms of exchange.

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Hegel's haptic thematics need not be soldered to the conjugal mode.  Two is not the ultimate number of love.  What happens when there is an orgy (n10) or in any case including prolonged masturbation where being touched and touching meld?  The limit experience, Hegel's Bewußtlosigkeit, contact to the point of loss of consciousness, is reproducible without engendering any child.

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Rethinking the inevitable naturalness of the obligation to reproduce whether biological or ideological invites heraclictic formulations:  reproduction without unification, continuities without reversibility.  In a contrary fashion, as if children of Parmenides, O'Brien and Althusser offer closed cycles as they struggle, their theoretical descriptions emmeshed in base-superstructure relations, with chicken and egg problems.

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Rethinking levels of description, rethinking premises, rethinking the articulation of interlocking patterns, in short asking metadiscursive questions, needs to be more often factored into theory making.

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What is it to ask how a question is asked?  It is to practice maieutics.  To discover in Althusser's text hints that an ideological apparatus controls a game of questions.  To grasp from O'Brien the temporal character of value conversion.  To understand how differently valued temporal modes discursively feedback into the creation of value: reproductive consciousness reproduces itself.  O'Brien herself claims in The Politics of Reproduction to be "labouring to give birth to a new philosophy of birth." (13)

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To practice maieutics in a culture of the question is to find replication and reproduction to be variants of emulation.  As conservation and shuffling of genetic material, replication and reproduction are carry over operations ­­ future directed.  Emulation is conformance to a pattern be it of the past, the present or a projected future ideal.  Emulation operates not with substance or things but with patterns and relations.  It is not the basis of social reproduction.  It emulates social reproduction and through metadiscursive movements does so nondyadically, does so dialectically.

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