What is the relation between philosophy and poetry; or, rather, how might the relations in which the two continually find themselves be thought productively through aesthetics? Schlegel's fragment frames the argument I want to develop here, not just by its insistence on a contrast between the two, but in its refusal of a "kingdom of barbarity beyond the boundaries of culture': it is not a question of protecting the boundaries of culture by defending established notions of poetry and philosophy, but, instead, of exploring the ways in which both continually test the limits that tradition has erected. This, I want to claim, might productively be done by evoking once again the categories of philosophical aesthetics to rethink the ways in which poetry, literature and art have been figured in recent theoreticalwork, and to reactivate their potentials to transform experience, thought and critical practice.