This doctoral dissertation considers anthropological and philosophical background and uses of Marx’s concept of the commodity fetishism. Starting from this considerations dissertation explores the conception of visual representation in the contemporary literary and cultural theory. Dissertation argues against classical Marxist understanding of the commodity fetishism as an illusion. Such understanding of Marx’s concept of the commodity fetishism as something that deludes or deceives human senses or misleads human mind confines Marx’s thinking within the limits of the dogmatic view of the metaphysics. This understanding of the fetishism as an illusion hinders affirming of the political and the ethical impetus of the literary and cultural theory. According to that dogmatic understanding of Marx’s concept of the commodity fetishism, epistemological emancipation serves as a prerequisite for any subsequent emancipation: liberation from ignorance liberates human being and leads to the state of absolute freedom. That kind of the ‘epistemological humanism’ which presents theory as the agency on human scale will not turn theory into something ‘practical’. Instead, ‘epistemological humanism’ turns theory into pedagogy that does not think but only specifies the sets of didactic prescriptions. Therefore, we did not inherit from Marx pure definitions and final answers that would turn his écriture into Holy Scripture. Rather, what we inherited from Marx are open questions and problems with alternative solutions. And this is exactly how things stand with the concept of commodity fetishism: it is a question, problem, or as Marx himself put it, it is a secret (Geheimnis). Such attempt to recover the ‘work of thinking’ in the seemingly finished and closed concept paves the way for entering into the conversation with some of the main contemporary or actual theoreticians and thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy) that in one fashion or another stresses the importance and potentiality of the Marx’s concept of the commodity fetishism.