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Diderot writes, in the Encyclopedia, a long entry, "Stockings loom", in which he compares the loom to a reasoning whose conclusion would be the textile. He resumes this comparison in the Refutation of Helvetius: there, Leibniz himself becomes a reflection machine, similar to the "stockings loom". The materialistic option of the machineman resumes a tradition that assimilates text and weaving. We find the same image in Goethe's Faust, cited by Freud in the Interpretation of dreams, and Henry James' novel The figure in the carpet. Invention is always a crisscrossing, a weaving, and a miscegenation, in an interaction between technical creation and representation of the intellectual activity. The programing system of the looms was later adapted to the first analytical machines, ancestors to our current computers. The Encyclopedia theorized this interaction, rehabilitating the loom and conceiving thought as a work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows the place of Diderot in the Materialism of the 18th Century, through and examination of a number of his texts, including articles published in the Encyclopédie, focusing especially in the relations betweeen Diderot's thought, the Leibnizian tradition and the philosophy of Baron d'Holbach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]