Following the conceptual directions outlined by Adorno in a university course dedicated to the concept of metaphysics, this article argues for the centrality of the reciprocal mediation between essence and appearance as a key to critically interpreting our contemporary condition. Today’s world appears increasingly torn between a spectral social objectivity and an ahistorical hypertrophy of the human subject. This condition is the effect of the phantasmagoria of capital. Returning to Marx’s critique of the fetish character of capital, it is possible to construct a structural genealogy of capitalist phantasmagoria, grounded in key references drawn from Hegel’s logic of essence and Aristotle’s pluralistic ontology.