Adorno himself doubted his early phantasmagoria analysis was resolved.

Evidence

Here, it might be objected that by equating phantasmagoria with the desire for commodities whose origins in human labour are hidden, Adorno invokes a myth of authenticity while assigning commodities an appearance one-sidedly declared to be inauthentic. However, it appears possible that this problem is not lost on him. In a letter to Benjamin from the same year in which he composed Wagner – the same letter in which he criticises the first draft of Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay – Adorno admits that ‘the phantasmagoria chapter of my book on Wagner has certainly not succeeded in resolving [the difficulty of commodity-form analysis] yet’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 387

Categorization

• QUESTION: Adorno’s own admission that commodity-form analysis in Wagner ‘has not succeeded’ invites tracing how later works (Negative Dialectics?) attempted to resolve this difficulty.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno chose a safe Habilitation topic because he lacked confidence for original work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 327