Em quatro anos:: de 1935 a 1939, crítica da cultura e fantasmagoria

The concept of fantasmagoria is still not fully considered in the research on the critical theory developed by Benjamin in the 1930s. Although Benjamin had written to Greten Adorno in 1939 that the focus of his research project at that moment was “the culture of the commodities society as phantasmagoria”, this concept does not appear in the Benjamins Begriffe and received only marginal considerations in the BenjaminHandbuch. Sustained by certain debattes in the secondady literature on Benjamin, this article aims to explore the main role played by the concept of phantasmagoria in Benjamin's critical theory in the 1930s. By addressing continuities and discontinuities between the Exposés of the Arcades Project written in 1935 and 1939, the paper shows that the concept of phanstasmagoria corresponds to the diagnostics of culture as the new form of myth produced by modern society.