Benjamin secularized theology into the Marxist commodity fetish concept

Evidence

Adorno’s approval, therefore, stemmed from his fascination with a new variant of the response to the passage in Marx’s Capital which was always the most important for left intellectuals in the Weimar period: the section on the fetish character of commodities. To look at the world of commodities with the eyes of a philologist interpreting allegories, a philologist who was also linked to Baudelaire, the first representative example of aesthetic modernism: in Adorno’s eyes, this promised an interpretation of capitalism in which the theological category of a materially corrupted world was translated into the Marxist category of the commodity fetish. This interpretation did not contradict dialectical materialism, but rather radicalized it by deciphering the world of commodities as a mythical primeval landscape and as a hellish, negative image of the true world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 215

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the precise translation built into Benjamin’s commodity-fetish reading: theology’s corrupted-material-world becomes Marx’s fetish.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Frankfurt School notes on Adorno reading commodity fetish as translating theological corruption into Marxist terms. — connects to: Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk merged historical materialism with theological concepts of nature, dream, and myth