Uses of the dialectical image: Adorno, surrealism, Breton, Benjamin

© 2014 Taylor and Francis. Contemporary interpretations of Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image tend to substitute object images, such as photographs, for subjective ones. In his own time, Benjamin's contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Andre Breton were suspicious of the role that objective images played in commodity capitalism. Adorno's Frankfurt School Marxism and Breton's Marxist surrealism illustrate the way that subjective images can be mobilized to think through the totality of capitalism rather than its products. This essay argues against the confusion of the dialectical image and its method with commodities.