Abstract
The work of Jorge Luis Borges has been associated with Poststructuralism. However, a close reading reveals other registers, such as an interest in reception and in the text as the meeting place of the self and the other, with the ethical consequences of this fundamental dimension of poiesis. A virtual encounter of the Argentinian poet and the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur allows to determine their relative position within Postmodernism, and to understand their enduring presence in face of the new theoretical approaches of the millenium, especially those that incorporate ethics to their critique of the work of art. The function of metaphor, the concepts of space and time in relation to the text, and the shaping of the individual or collective self as part of the exchanges between text and reality, constitute the common elements of their scheme of thought. From an esthetical perspective we are progressively led into an ethical space, in a process of inquiry that puts the text, in its role of testing ground, in contact with life as an ongoing action, and makes poetry the center of the human experience, as a medium to enlarge and increase the capacity of meaning of our language. Their imaginary dialogue is akin to a humanist project placed at the outer limits of Postmodernism.