Smokin Moose
Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex Moderator
High minded
Walter Benjamin's writings on drugs, just published in a new translation, suggest the possibilities--and limits--of intoxication
German literary critic Walter Benjamin in 1929. (Globe Staff Photo Illustration)
AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a "poison," and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to "On Hashish," a slim English translation of Benjamin's writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, "Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin's intellectual milieu" in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.
And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin's earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-op*um, hashish, mes*aline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and "protocols": observations in Benjamin's hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.
In the writings collected in "On Hashish," some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode. "Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes. All those present take on hues of the comic," he writes in "Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish" from 1927. He can also be downright silly-"oven turns into cat"; "I can see why, when one is hiding in the grass, one can fish in the earth"-proof that an intellectual on drugs can sound little different than, say, your average stoned college kid.
Still, despite such loopiness, these writings can be read profitably as an extension of Benjamin's particular take on modern culture. For Benjamin, drug experiences were not an escape from the tumult and decadence of Weimar Germany, they were a vital adjunct to his lifelong quest to unlock the secrets of modernity. In a 1928 letter to his close friend and confidante, the theologian Gershom Scholem, Benjamin wrote that his hash-inspired note-taking "may well turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are most intimately related."
Born in 1892 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was a sober, strait-laced child. He enjoyed the trappings of upper middle class life: private tutors, boarding school, university in Freiberg and Bern, where he completed his thesis, "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," in 1920. Though Benjamin possessed all the grave habits of an academic, he instead opted for the perils of freelance life, a decision that ultimately served him well. In a few years, he had emerged as one of Germany's leading intellectuals, writing for newspapers and magazines on a vast range of topics-politics, history, literature, theology, aesthetics, and a hodgepodge of offbeat esoterica such as astrology and the collecting of old letters. (He even proposed, fittingly, a "theory of distraction.")
A difficult, at times opaque stylist whose work would inspire the intellectuals of the `60s New Left and become a touchstone of contemporary cultural studies, Benjamin fused a deeply mystical turn of mind with Marxist politics in what could be a heady, sometimes uneasy mix. Scholem once said that Benjamin was a "theologian marooned in the realm of the profane."
It was to escape that realm that Benjamin turned to intoxicants, in search of what he called "profane illumination." In a famous 1929 essay on surrealism, he tried to spell out the concept: More than just a fancy way of getting high, "profane illumination" is a "materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, op*um, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson."
Benjamin can be perversely elusive-sometimes you wonder if you need to be on drugs to get him-but he hoped to show that certain habits of mind lent themselves to the pursuit of profane illumination."`The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the op*um eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic." The flaneur in particular-the urban nomad who wanders from place to place, collecting images "wherever they lodge"-was a key figure for Benjamin, a phenomenological detective, always peeking around the corner into the shadows, trying to summon the spirits of a place and break through the clutter and bric-a-brac of modern life.
Hashish, Benjamin believed, gave its user a similar kind of perception-a sort of X-ray vision providing access to the inner workings of time and space, culture and history. In a 1933 entry, he writes, "There is no more valid legitimation of crock"-Benjamin's code word for hashish-"than the consciousness of having suddenly penetrated, with its help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces." Beyond the veil, Boon explains, lay "secret transcendental forces" that Benjamin hoped might point to revolution.
Benjamin tried to harness these states of intoxication for the purposes of his inquiry into the nature of capitalism. He hankered, as Boon notes, for a "left wing politics of intoxication," and indeed he turned sharply towards Marxism after the rise of the Nazis. But his drug writings are too inward, scattered, and serene to point towards any revolutionary upsurge.
Like others before and since, his desire to wed mysticism to a revolutionary politics failed to produce satisfying results. (There is a reason Benjamin's drug texts are not among his most influential writings-and why his ambition to mount a large-scale project on hashish remained unfulfilled.) Benjamin's drug experiments may have honed his sociological and literary senses-"feeling of understanding [Edgar Allan] Poe much better," he writes in 1927-but there would be no communal rush to the barricades. The revolutionary potential of the drug trance exists purely in the mind.
There are darker premonitions as well in Benjamin's drug notes. "A formula for the nearness of my death came to me yesterday: Death lies between me and my intoxication," Benjamin wrote in 1928-an especially haunting remark given the circumstances of his death.
In 1933, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, where he scraped together a hand-to-mouth existence. When France fell to Hitler in 1940, he tried to escape across the Pyrenees to Spain. Hung up on the Franco-Spanish border, unable to secure a transit visa, he committed suicide by an overdose of mor*hine tablets, which he carried in case of capture. In the end, Benjamin was a victim of National Socialism-a political intoxication, one might say, of an entirely different order.
By Matthew Price
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Walter Benjamin's writings on drugs, just published in a new translation, suggest the possibilities--and limits--of intoxication
German literary critic Walter Benjamin in 1929. (Globe Staff Photo Illustration)
AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a "poison," and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to "On Hashish," a slim English translation of Benjamin's writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, "Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin's intellectual milieu" in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.
And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin's earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-op*um, hashish, mes*aline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and "protocols": observations in Benjamin's hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.
In the writings collected in "On Hashish," some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode. "Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes. All those present take on hues of the comic," he writes in "Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish" from 1927. He can also be downright silly-"oven turns into cat"; "I can see why, when one is hiding in the grass, one can fish in the earth"-proof that an intellectual on drugs can sound little different than, say, your average stoned college kid.
Still, despite such loopiness, these writings can be read profitably as an extension of Benjamin's particular take on modern culture. For Benjamin, drug experiences were not an escape from the tumult and decadence of Weimar Germany, they were a vital adjunct to his lifelong quest to unlock the secrets of modernity. In a 1928 letter to his close friend and confidante, the theologian Gershom Scholem, Benjamin wrote that his hash-inspired note-taking "may well turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are most intimately related."
Born in 1892 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was a sober, strait-laced child. He enjoyed the trappings of upper middle class life: private tutors, boarding school, university in Freiberg and Bern, where he completed his thesis, "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," in 1920. Though Benjamin possessed all the grave habits of an academic, he instead opted for the perils of freelance life, a decision that ultimately served him well. In a few years, he had emerged as one of Germany's leading intellectuals, writing for newspapers and magazines on a vast range of topics-politics, history, literature, theology, aesthetics, and a hodgepodge of offbeat esoterica such as astrology and the collecting of old letters. (He even proposed, fittingly, a "theory of distraction.")
A difficult, at times opaque stylist whose work would inspire the intellectuals of the `60s New Left and become a touchstone of contemporary cultural studies, Benjamin fused a deeply mystical turn of mind with Marxist politics in what could be a heady, sometimes uneasy mix. Scholem once said that Benjamin was a "theologian marooned in the realm of the profane."
It was to escape that realm that Benjamin turned to intoxicants, in search of what he called "profane illumination." In a famous 1929 essay on surrealism, he tried to spell out the concept: More than just a fancy way of getting high, "profane illumination" is a "materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, op*um, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson."
Benjamin can be perversely elusive-sometimes you wonder if you need to be on drugs to get him-but he hoped to show that certain habits of mind lent themselves to the pursuit of profane illumination."`The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the op*um eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic." The flaneur in particular-the urban nomad who wanders from place to place, collecting images "wherever they lodge"-was a key figure for Benjamin, a phenomenological detective, always peeking around the corner into the shadows, trying to summon the spirits of a place and break through the clutter and bric-a-brac of modern life.
Hashish, Benjamin believed, gave its user a similar kind of perception-a sort of X-ray vision providing access to the inner workings of time and space, culture and history. In a 1933 entry, he writes, "There is no more valid legitimation of crock"-Benjamin's code word for hashish-"than the consciousness of having suddenly penetrated, with its help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces." Beyond the veil, Boon explains, lay "secret transcendental forces" that Benjamin hoped might point to revolution.
Benjamin tried to harness these states of intoxication for the purposes of his inquiry into the nature of capitalism. He hankered, as Boon notes, for a "left wing politics of intoxication," and indeed he turned sharply towards Marxism after the rise of the Nazis. But his drug writings are too inward, scattered, and serene to point towards any revolutionary upsurge.
Like others before and since, his desire to wed mysticism to a revolutionary politics failed to produce satisfying results. (There is a reason Benjamin's drug texts are not among his most influential writings-and why his ambition to mount a large-scale project on hashish remained unfulfilled.) Benjamin's drug experiments may have honed his sociological and literary senses-"feeling of understanding [Edgar Allan] Poe much better," he writes in 1927-but there would be no communal rush to the barricades. The revolutionary potential of the drug trance exists purely in the mind.
There are darker premonitions as well in Benjamin's drug notes. "A formula for the nearness of my death came to me yesterday: Death lies between me and my intoxication," Benjamin wrote in 1928-an especially haunting remark given the circumstances of his death.
In 1933, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, where he scraped together a hand-to-mouth existence. When France fell to Hitler in 1940, he tried to escape across the Pyrenees to Spain. Hung up on the Franco-Spanish border, unable to secure a transit visa, he committed suicide by an overdose of mor*hine tablets, which he carried in case of capture. In the end, Benjamin was a victim of National Socialism-a political intoxication, one might say, of an entirely different order.
By Matthew Price
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
