The poethic functions on the levels of theme, form, image, metaphor (Circe becomes The Queen of Hearts from Through the Lookinglass), the relation of the I of ènonciation to I in the ènoncè, the self of a past to the self of a present, the self to the other, to the world, everything in a two-way dynamic. In an ethics of wonder the I and its process of imagination in poetry, and by analogy the relations of self to Other that humans mediate in discourse (and through it every relation they enter), become one of limitation, partiality, an embodiment for both subjects which limits their desire, but which includes the desires and becoming of both/all--"an affect that would subsist among all forms or others irreducible to each other . . . when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world" (Irigaray 82). The ethic of wonder means not the nihilistic disintegration of the subject, but the placing of that subject into full and accountable relation to its world, its Others, and its own desire or imagination.

It is a utopic project, this letting-the-self-be-affected, this moving in an envelope which involves Irigaray in excavating the openings in the history of philosophy where this dynamic relation almost appeared. A difficult project to perform poetically, and theoretically as Kearney calls us to do, it requires risks in form and content, questions about what can and cannot be included and attempts to include, rereadings of history, of philosophy. All of it intended, motivated to put pressure on an ideology motivated to support, defend and reinforce one identity, to pressure that ideology toward the ethics it has suppressed and avoided developing since Aristotle and Plato's dialogue with Diotima where Irigaray shows that the:

This is Irigaray's thesis, that in her utopic ethics of (sexual) difference, as opposed to an ideology of disintegrating sameness, becoming is the priority, not establishing, and that generation, fecundity, a poetics of the possible is the goal. A union, not a contest over privileged access to power, is the process, and yields a poethic of respect and accountability, a limbering of the subject to stretch into its possibility in relation to the other.