This essay theoretically reviews the different meanings and implications of Walter Benjamin’s phrase “ lost in the city”. To explain and investigate the different senses, a relationship is established between the city and certain categories that make theoretical exploration possible: poetic to inhabit, existence in rupture and a dialectical transcendence of sense, notions from which it is possible to construct a fundamental nexus. The in-depth review of Benjamin’s phrase is linked to the critique of capitalist modernity from a conception of the world à rebours and a historical-dialectic view proper to the thinker of the arcades of Paris.