Speculative experience and history. Benjamin's goethean kantianism

143 historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of the empirical world of plants’ (AP N2a, 4). The presentation of such an Urphänomen is defined as the dialectical image (AP N9a, 4). Benjamin is clear, however, that these economic facts do not exhibit such a synthesis ‘from the standpoint of causality...and that means considered as causes’ (AP N2a, 4). This deployment of the Goethean figure of the Urphänomen reiterates the critique of the causal, rather than expressive, relation between base and superstructure presented in the orthodox Marxist materialism considered above, and the critical necessity for an imagistic rather than conceptual synthesis which follows from this.