I hope, in conclusion, that Irigaray's comments on women's politics can be understood alongside her notions of love and desire that are refigured as non-appropriative intermediaries between sexuate subjects. These relations must be understood within the context of her argument for new subjectivities. Irigaray's work is both philosophical and political. It is a political–philosophical project, a politics that is founded upon the recognition of the sexuate other in the emergence of subjectivity, and gives rise to a politics of grace and wonder, and requires the courage to step into the unknown, to push the boundaries, to crack open time and to invent the new.1 Irigaray starts with refi guring subjectivity via the most intimate and personal level of breath, love and desire as the beginning of a new epoch, a new reality, for it is within these most intimate relations that our lives begin and our reality is constructed in the first place. It within these contexts that we read Irigaray's political philosophy as challenge to liberal multiculturalism and western liberal feminism. Irigaray's thinking of a ‘women's politics’ that challenges the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ must be read in the context of her overall political–philosophical project I have outlined in this book.

Irigaray concludes Between East and West echoing the call she announced in ‘Sexual Difference’ almost thirty years before. At that time Irigaray wrote:

Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age … each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through. (Irigaray 1993a: 5)