WHILE in the 1940s the Spanish philosopher Jose Gaos characterized aesthetic thought as one in which Hispanic-American thinkers had made their most outstanding contributions to Western philosophy, (1) by the 1970s both immanentist and transcendentalist philosophers in Latin America regarded aesthetic thought as alien to philosophy proper. (2) As a result of the erasure of the aesthetic or "poetic" modes of thinking from the Latin American philosophic tradition, Latin American philosophers have overlooked some of the most creative and original responses to hegemonic Western philosophical categories produced in the region. This article seeks to recuperate the excluded territory of poetic thought by considering the contributions of one of the most skillful Latin American dialecticians of the twentieth century -- Octavio Paz. Before we proceed, I will describe the poetic reply to philosophical metaphors, and argue for its utility as a practice capable of both recognizing the influence, and challenging the hegemonic status of Western philosophic discourses in the Latin American context. The rest of this discussion will serve as a transgression of the poetry-philosophy divide by way of Octavio Paz's poetic reply to Hegel's dialectical philosophical discourse. Discussing Paz's approach to dialectics is not meant to showcase his transformation of hegemonic philosophical terms as some sort of ideal poetic reply. Rather, the purpose is to observe how treating philosophical categories in the terrain of poetry facilitates our understanding of language and the complex relations that exist between philosophic and poetic modes of being in the world.
