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On Hashish, by Walter Benjamin
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Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.
Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called "profane illumination." At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin's work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls "image space" comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.
This English-language edition of On Hashish features a section of supplementary materials--drawn from Benjamin's essays, letters, and sketches--relating to hashish use, as well as a reminiscence by his friend Jean Selz, which concerns a night of opium-smoking in Ibiza. A preface by Howard Eiland discusses the leading motifs of Benjamin's reflections on intoxication.
- Sales Rank: #351360 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Belknap Press
- Published on: 2006-05-30
- Released on: 2006-06-29
- Original language: German
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.50" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .56 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
- Great product!
Review
The essays and notes that Benjamin devoted to the characteristics of narcotic intoxication...are, despite their fragmentary nature, among the most authentic ever put to paper .... Benjamin's experiments correspond quite precisely to the specific cognitive intentions articulated in his most developed philosophical texts.... Like the micrological explorations that typify his philosophizing as a whole, his experiences of intoxication bring to light surprising finds. (Hermann Schweppenh�user, co-editor of Walter Benjamin's collected works)
Fascinating...On Hashish gives the reader a sense of Benjamin's philosophical method and a tour through the library (and the staggering erudition) that supported it, but also provides some insight into the man himself--his drives, his fears, and his creative process. (Michael Berk Nextbook 2006-05-16)
In search of heightened awareness, Benjamin would eat hashish, smoke opium and get injected with mescaline...Some of his notes (such as the part about giggling) will be familiar to any contemporary stoner, but even when dealing with drugs he surprises his readers...Everything Benjamin wrote, even when the subject is less than pleasant, exudes an almost euphoric spirit. It was as if he wrote as a form of worship, out of gratitude for the chance to live and discover. (Robert Fulford National Post 2006-05-30)
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the radical thinker and cultural critic Walter Benjamin made a series of experiments with hashish, mescaline and opium...This very welcome collection is the first in English to round up his better-known drug pieces, such as his elliptical account of a hashish-intoxicated evening stroll around the port of Marseilles, and to place them in the context of the related notes, drafts and marginalia that track the course of his elusive and constantly evolving project. This is a very worthwhile venture, and one that produces a book much greater than the sum of its parts. Benjamin's scattershot approach to recording his drug experiences means that there are as many nuggets of brilliance (and as many incomprehensible rambles) in his notes and journal entries as in his finished prose. (Mike Jay Fortean Times 2006-09-01)
[On Hashish is] a miscellany, gathering the protocols of [Benjamin's] drug experiments, two accounts of his experiences, and a handful of references to drugs culled from his other works. It can only begin to suggest the true importance of drug experiences for the development of Benjamin's thought. Yet for this very reason On Hashish stands in the same relation to a more conventional essay on drugs as Benjamin's literary essays do to conventional criticism...What makes On Hashish an important book is that Benjamin's drug experiments not only were a failure in themselves but also shifted the ground beneath his other work in a way that he never fully acknowledged. (Adam Kirsch New Yorker 2006-08-21)
[Benjamin's] drug experiences show once again how singularly committed he was to the program of the avant-garde: overcoming the limitations of the self by subjecting it to an array of pulverizing, Dionysian, ego-transcending influences. (Richard Wolin The Nation 2006-10-16)
Drugs did, mostly, make Benjamin smile, and what could bring smiles to the lips of this proud, gifted and doomed man can't but bring smiles to the reader. There is wonderful writing in this book, much of which illuminates Benjamin's better known, equally suggestive, and no less enigmatic texts. Plus, here, we catch him tapping his foot. And smiling. (Harvey Blume Jerusalem Report 2006-10-16)
Harvard's pocket-sized On Hashish, edited by Howard Eiland, brings together everything that Benjamin ever wrote on the subject. It includes notes by him and his friends about the drug protocols and two essays. One of Benjamin's solitary experiments ended up as the basis for 'Hashish in Marseilles,' an essay that begins with him sitting in his hotel waiting for the drug to hit and then follows him around the streets. At points along the way, he giggles at his own jokes, has paranoid thoughts, feels the immensity of his solitude, and gets hungry. A piece of ice brings enormous pleasure; P�t� de Lyon reminds him of the words 'Lion paste'; the name of a boat in the harbor makes him think of aerial warfare; and he passes two men on the street who remind him of Dante and Petrarch. (Eric Bulson Times Literary Supplement 2007-04-20)
Benjamin's work continues to fascinate and delight because it has something for everyone: the literary critic, art historian, philosopher, urban theorist and architect. Whether he is talking about children's toys, Mickey Mouse, Surrealism, photography, or Kafka, Benjamin has a knack for figuring out what they can tell us about the wider world that produced them. (Eric Bulson Times Literary Supplement 2007-04-20)
About the Author
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.
Howard Eiland teaches literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Marcus Boon is Associate Professor of English at York University, Toronto.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
A revolutionary contact high?
By A reader reader
Benjamin aptly describes the bipolar nature of his own intoxicated illumination when he writes that, in "the imagination put in thrall to thinking during hashish intoxication," there are two "different sorts of powers: a genius of melancholy gravity, another of Ariel-like spirituality." Here, first, is an illustration of Benjamin's genius for melancholic heaviness: "In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glaces of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness -- a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm..." Here, next, an example of his more uplifting, "Ariel-like spirituality": "Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, nor eternity too long. Against the background of these immense dimensions of inner experience, of absolute duration and immeasurable space, a wonderful, beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time." In the end, sadly, the darkness seems to have won out over the light in Bejamin's own life, but one wonders whether that fate would have been averted had he not lived through such dark days? Still, Benjamin believed in the revolutionary potential of the experiences he describes in this book to lighten the times, and he came to advocate a "profane illumination" that would be capable of recapturing the transformative insights hashish (and also opium and mescaline) afforded without continually requiring the drugs themselves. Such ideas seem to me to be well worth pondering.
This is wonderful, nostalgia-inducing, provocative collection of Benjamin's waking dreams and wandering reflections.
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing ramblings on cannabis
By David F. Duncan
I was looking forward to some profound insights from a hashish using philosopher. Frankly, I've heard better from a stoned college student. I found nothing of substance in this book. Perhaps some will find it enough that a recognized major modern philosopher regarded hashish as worthy of study and contemplation but I don't.
17 of 76 people found the following review helpful.
Metaphysical Giggles
By Daniel Myers
I bought this book because it came as a bit of a shock to me that the uptight highbrow metaphysician, Walter Benjamin, had experimented with hashish. I knew, as one does, about his suicide by taking a morphine tablet. But I imagined that this was a one time thing, done as a way of escaping Nazi arrest.
Well, what do we get when a rather tedious, uptight German metaphysician smokes some pot? An uptight, convoluted, ponderous description of it. German philosophers tend to write this way you know, as any reader who has had to plough through Kant and Hegel is well aware.
In today's era, when every other suburban housewife smokes a joint from time to time, all these "insights" cited by the editorials seem more than absurd. They rise to the level of high camp. All this convoluted, philosophical introspection to describe the increase in appetite-You know, getting the "munchies"-almost made me titter aloud, as Benjamin does when he ingests the drug, and acts as if this is some profound revelation about the absurdity of existence. I'm sure we all remember those dorm room giggles.
Yes, one can argue that this is a jaded age and that our familiarity with all these effects does not vitiate a profound philosopher's insights. I wouldn't want to argue it though.
This age is not any more jaded than the one in which Benjamin took his life rather than be captured by the mass murderers unleashed throughout Europe at the time. And his insights are not profound. They're typical of German metaphysical twaddle, and, as such, excruciatingly tedious and boring.
Maybe there is somebody out there who would appreciate this book, some pale admirer of the German metaphysicians who is still rereading Hegel to unlock his insights. They don't exist - that goes for Benjamin as well as Hegel.
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