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Borrow from Freud a « representation of matter »: only on that condition, could materialism avoid becoming a « senile idealism ». That is the strange proposition which Bataille formulated in the article on « Materialism », written for the critical dictionary of the journal Documents. The proposition enables us to read through the texts he wrote between 1928 and 1934, discovering in them the elaboration not of a materialist doctrine but a questioning of the materialist attitude, which can be articulated in terms of a certain relation, implicit or explicit, to Freud’s thinking. Bataille’s position is an original one, insofar as he did not seek to produce a synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxism, between the unconscious and history. His contention was rather that the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis, at a certain point, both speak of the same thing.