Benjamin’s Phantasmagorias: Socially Necessary Semblance and the Dialectical Image of Capital

This article contributes to recent value-theoretical efforts to ground capitalist mystification in its social structure by reconstructing WalterBenjamins late work on phantasmagoria. Following Benjamin’s theoretical trajectory, the author examines his systematic attempt to theorize ideology through its phenomenal forms of appearance. Though often treated as a merely psychological category, phantasmagoria emerged in the late 1930s as the central concept of Benjamin’s work through his intensified engagement with Marx’s mature writings and Karl Korschs commentaries. Contextualizing this crucial turn in Benjamin’s thought, this article interprets phantasmagoria as a category of social-aesthetic mediation, intrinsically linked to capitalism’s social logic and organization of temporality and historical consciousness. This interpretation, which grounds Benjamin’s work in the Marxian problematic of critical representation or Darstellung, sheds new light on his more well-known views on history and capitalist modernity. The article contends that it was only through his late encounter with Marx and Korsch that Benjamin came to see revolution as an interruption of the capitalist phantasmagorias of empty time and civilizational progress.