Walter Benjamin. On Hashish. Introduction by Marcus Boon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 182 pp. $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02221-8.
Reviewed by Robert P. Stephens (Department of History, Virginia Tech)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)
Profane Illuminations
On Hashish brings together under one cover the textual remnants of Walter Benjamin's intermittent experiments with drugs.[1] The bulk of the book is given over to twelve unpublished "protocols" of experiments undertaken between 1927 and 1934. These are followed by the only two pieces on hashish Benjamin published during his lifetime, "Myslovice-Braunschweig-Marseilles" published in the journal Uhu in 1930 and the more famous "Hashish in Marseilles" in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1932, both of which are based on one of the hashish protocols from 1928. The book also includes excerpts about drug experimentation from One-Way Street (1923-26), "Surrealism" (1929), and The Arcades Project (1927-40), as well as fragments from notebooks and letters and one memoir published by Jean Selz in Les Lettres Nouvelles (1959) about smoking opium with Benjamin on Ibiza in 1933. A foreword by editor and translator Howard Eiland elucidates some of the more significant running themes in the texts, while an impressive introduction by Marcus Boon places Benjamin's drug experiments within a larger literary context.
Benjamin's experimentations with drugs were not particularly novel during the interwar period. As Scott J. Thompson has noted, Benjamin was part of a circle of friends joined by a shared interest in the psyche and intoxication, a "Weimar psychonautic avant-garde" that included among its membership the physician Ernst Joël and the neurologist Fritz Fränkel (who introduced Benjamin into their own experiments on psychotropic substances), and the philosopher Ernst Bloch, as well as Benjamin's cousin Egon Wissing and his wife Gert Wissing.[2] Outside this circle intense interest arose in the intersection of intoxication and aesthetics, from well-known habitués such as Jean Cocteau, Antonin Artaud, and Hans Fallada, through less well-known figures, such as Stanislaw Witkiewicz and René Daumal (pp. 5-6). Similarly, scientific circles throughout Europe attempted to unlock the subconscious with drugs and utilized self-experimentation to help understand addiction and expand the psycho-pharmacopoeia.[3]
Yet Benjamin's forays into the realm of the psychotropic strike an atypical chord. Marcus Boon notes, "[i]f ever there was someone who took drugs because of reading books about them, then that person was Walter Benjamin" (p. 1). After reading Charles Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises (1860), Benjamin remarked in a letter to Ernst Schoen in 1919 that "it will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book," setting the stage for his later experiments (p. 1). Benjamin's deep interest in Baudelaire, and hence with the Urgeschichte of modernity, emerge again and again in these texts. Rather than becoming invested in the experience of intoxication per se, Benjamin uses it to rehearse themes more central to his oeuvre.
This is not to say that the texts crystallize his thoughts; the protocols, in particular, are peculiar, often fleeting and disjointed glimpses of a keen mind on drugs. Benjamin has a well-deserved reputation as "difficult" or "opaque," and readers may well find the protocols particularly demanding. Yet within the forest of intricate, fragmented prose complicated by the mixture of first- and second-person reporting of the experiments, one can divine the modulation of his ideas through the experience of intoxication. He uses his drug experiments to contemplate the themes of Rausch (intoxication), correspondences, the aura, and the ornament, all of which play a large role in his later works. The distortions afforded by intoxication allow him to ponder the human relationship to objects and the temporal correspondences between past and present, which are central to his writings in the thirties, including the unfinished Arcades project.
Some of the fragments exhibit the brilliance of Benjamin's best work. One of his earliest discussions of "the aura" appears in the protocol of a March 1930 experiment (pp. 57-58), and his insights about the "colportage of phenomenon of space" hint at the direction his later work would take (pp. 28-29 and p. 163, n. 2). On the other hand, many of the comments are so apparently random and obscure as to be unintelligible. In Fränkel's protocol of an April 1931 experiment, for instance, he quotes Benjamin as saying, "If Freud were to do a psychoanalysis of creation, the fjords would come off badly" (p. 71). In any case, the protocols faithfully record the mental slippages from the profound to the banal afforded by intoxication.
While the corpus of Benjamin scholarship has grown enormously in the past three decades, the drug experiments have received relatively little attention. Most of the scholarly attention to the drug experiments has focused on the development of Benjamin's conception of "profane illumination." Hermann Schweppenhäuser, one of the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften, pioneered this line of argument, claiming: "Benjamin's experiments correspond quite precisely to the specific cognitive intentions articulated in his most developed philosophical texts, intentions that would find expression above all in the extraordinary Passagen-Werk, whose prospecting forays, with their lightning-like illumination of things, bringing bits and pieces to the surface, have much in common with what Benjamin set down in the notes on intoxication and the experimental protocols, formulated as they are as discontinuous, utterly concise, and at the same time painfully incisive fragments."[4]
For Schweppenhäuser, the hashish protocols are a key to unlocking Benjamin's later work. Others have been more critical of this notion.[5] Indeed, Benjamin seems to place a limit on the illumination afforded by intoxicants in his essay "Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia": "But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter)" (pp. 132-133). Later in the same essay, Benjamin draws a distinction by placing intoxication on a lower rung of illumination: "The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take in solitude."[6] As in many of Benjamin's later works, the key is the dialectical moment of moving past illumination to political action. While intoxication or other forms of profane illumination may lead to insight, only political action can change the future. Profane illumination is not an end in itself but a means. In this context, it is helpful to read the entire text of the surrealism essay, a portion of which is excerpted in this volume.
On Hashish is an important addition to the English language catalog of Benjamin's work. For the serious Benjamin scholar, it opens a door to the development of Benjamin's thought during a crucial period, particularly in the reworking of material over several iterations. This repetitiveness, on the other hand, may prove disconcerting to the casual reader. Howard Eiland should be commended for his translation and his thoughtful forward, and Marcus Boon's introduction serves as an excellent guide for placing Benjamin's work in context.
Notes
[1]. The first collection of Benjamin's drug experiments was published by Suhrkamp in 1972: Walter Benjamin, Über Haschisch, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). Scott J. Thompson published an English translation of this book for the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate on the internet in 1997, available at the following URL: http://www.wbenjamin.org/translations.html#hashish . The current translators acknowledge consulting it (p. xii). The title On Hashish is a bit of a misnomer (held over from the 1972 German version) since the protocols include not just hashish consumption, but Benjamin's leisurely introduction to opium smoking on Ibiza as well as his experiences with subcutaneous injections of both mescaline and the narcotic Eukodal (oxycodone).
[2]. Scott J. Thompson, "From 'Rausch' to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism," Journal of Cognitive Liberties 1 (2000): 21-42.
[3]. See, for instance, W. Pieper & The Grüne Kraft, eds., Nazis on Speed: Drogen im 3. Reich, 2 vols. (Löhrbach: W. Pieper & The Grüne Kraft, 2002), and Jochen Gartz, Halluzinogene in historischen Schriften: Eine Anthologie von 1913-1968 (Solothurn: Nachtschatten Verlag, 1999).
[4]. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, "Propaedeutics of Profane Illumination," in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 34-35.
[5]. See, for instance, John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 220-229; Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3-41; and Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 187-188. Scott J. Thompson rejects the delineation between intoxication and profane illumination, arguing that they can exist simultaneously, that profane illumination "can take place on the inebriated voyage itself"; see note 2.
[6]. See the full version of the essay: "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1: 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 207-221.
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Citation:
Robert P. Stephens. Review of Benjamin, Walter, On Hashish.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14786
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