Abstract

Like other thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, Georges Bataille seeks to identify a unifying theoretical-philosophical principle of dialectical materialism, accomplishing this through affirmation of a radical materialism, whose characteristics are the recovery of ”base matter” and the critique of all sublimated elevation to what is “higher.” In this effort, in a distinctive juxtaposition to both Marxism and psychoanalysis, he considers the relations of materialism with the Hegelian dialectic and Nietzschean genealogy, valuing the presence of “base matter” in these philosophical projects and critiquing, in the same manner, the fact that, in them, “base matter” is sublimated in the “higher.”