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THE PHILOSOPHER STONED
By Adam Kirsch
New Yorker
Aug. 14, 2006
What drugs taught Walter Benjamin.
On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin
began writing a memorandum titled "Main Features of My First Impression
of Hashish." It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he
thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug
but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and
the streets he wandered-like life itself-hashish was important to
him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.
For a writer with Benjamin's interests and allegiances, a rendezvous
with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took
him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919,
he had been fascinated by Baudelaire's "Artificial Paradises," in
which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that
they sound like invitations: "You know that hashish always evokes
magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions,
cascades of liquid gold." Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one
of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book's
"childlike innocence and purity," but was disappointed in its lack
of philosophical rigor, noting, "It will be necessary to repeat this
attempt independently." The notes from his first hashish trance show
him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. "The gates to
a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening," he wrote. "Only, I don't
wish to enter." According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin
smoked opium on several occasions, "Benjamin was a smoker who refused
the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn't want to yield to
it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation."
Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions
as either subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude
toward drugs remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them
when he was alone, and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor
friends to procure hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The
sessions were recorded in "protocols," furnishing raw material for
what Benjamin intended to be a major book on the philosophical and
psychological implications of drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom
Scholem, his best friend from the age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then
forty, listed four unwritten books that he considered "large-scale
defeats"-evidence of the "ruin or catastrophe" that his career had
become-the last was a "truly exceptional book about hashish."
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, a book by Walter Benjamin
called "On Hashish" has finally appeared in English, along with another
long-gestated work, "Berlin Childhood Around 1900" (Harvard; $14.95
each). "On Hashish" is not, however, the "truly exceptional book"
he had in mind; it's a miscellany, gathering the protocols of his
drug experiments, two published 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. "You hardly feel that you have been
reading criticism," Frank Kermode noted when "Illuminations," the
first English-language selection of Benjamin's writings, appeared,
in 1968. "It requires the kind of response we are accustomed to give
to works of art." "Illuminations" revealed just a few peaks from
the sunken continent of Benjamin's work, but these were enough to
establish him as a central figure in the history of modernism.
Benjamin approached every genre as a kind of laboratory for his
lifelong investigations into language, philosophy, and art, and his
ideas on these subjects are so original, and so radical in their
implications, that they remain profoundly challenging today, more
than sixty-five years after his death.
The period of Benjamin's adulthood and achievement was 1914 to 1940,
the darkest in modern European history, and, if no one ever wrote
criticism the way he did, it is because no other critic felt the
dislocations of the time so severely. Benjamin was born in Berlin
in 1892, into a prosperous Jewish family, and his expectations were
formed in the halcyon period before 1914. In "A Berlin Chronicle,"
a series of newspaper articles that make up the nucleus of "Berlin
Childhood Around 1900," he remembered the feeling of bourgeois security
that suffused the very furniture in his family's apartment:
Here reigned a species of things that was, no matter how compliantly it
bowed to the minor whims of fashion, in the main so wholly convinced of
itself and its permanence that it took no account of wear, inheritance,
or moves, remaining forever equally near to and far from its ending,
which seemed the ending of all things.
In such a home, poverty was unimaginable: "The poor? For rich children
of his generation, they lived at the back of beyond."
In time-honored fashion, Benjamin hoped to abandon the commercial
milieu of his father, a successful antiques dealer, for a more
prestigious career as an academic. By the time the First World War
began, he was already committed to a life of scholarship and, as an
opponent of the war, felt no qualms about maneuvering to get out of
military service. The best source for Benjamin's life in these years,
Gershom Scholem's moving yet unsentimental memoir, "Walter Benjamin:
The Story of a Friendship," records that the two of them stayed up
the whole night before Benjamin's draft-board medical exam, "while
Benjamin consumed vast quantities of black coffee, a practice then
followed by many young men prior to their military physicals." The
trick, calculated to simulate a weak heart, worked, and Benjamin was
able to spend the rest of the war in Switzerland, studying for his
doctorate at the University of Bern.
Scholem shared Benjamin's academic ambitions and his antiwar
convictions, and their student friendship laid the groundwork for
a lifetime of intellectual debate, most of which was to take place
by mail. The most important issue between them, from the beginning,
was Judaism, and the possibility of being a Jewish intellectual in
Germany. For Scholem, an ardent Zionist who was expelled from his
assimilated family for his views, the history of Jewish mysticism
gradually displaced mathematics and philosophy as a focus of study.
For Benjamin, however, Judaism remained more a possibility to be
imagined than a life to be lived. He never mastered its religious
practices or sacred texts, and, as he acknowledged to Scholem, "I
have come to know living Judaism in absolutely no form other than you."
The friends' divergent attitudes toward Jewishness largely
determined their subsequent careers. Neither of them entered the
German university life for which they had trained. In 1923, Scholem,
changing his first name from the German Gerhard to the Hebrew Gershom,
emigrated to Palestine, where there was no university; he planned
to support himself as a schoolteacher. As fate would have it, when
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded, shortly afterward,
he was named one of the first professors, and by the time of his
death, in 1982, he had become known as the greatest modern scholar
of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin, who remained closer to home, ended
up straying much farther from his early academic path. Having taken
his doctorate in 1919, he enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to
write his Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation required for
teaching in a German university. But even as he was researching the
thesis, which became "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," Benjamin
suspected that it would never be approved by the tradition-bound
faculty. The thesis, less a historical treatise than a philosophical
meditation on the nature of allegory, was, he bragged to Scholem,
"unmitigated chutzpah." Even worse than the possibility of being
rejected, however, was the possibility of being accepted. In February,
1925, as he prepared to submit the dissertation, Benjamin admitted,
"I dread almost everything that would result from a positive resolution
to all of this: I dread Frankfurt above all, then lectures, students,
etc." He needn't have worried. Although the dissertation contains
some of his most radical insights into language and literature, his
examiners rejected it, admitting that they couldn't understand a single
page. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, then, his career took a sharp
turn. With his parents increasingly unwilling or unable to support
him, he began to earn a living as a freelance literary journalist,
contributing to the culture sections of newspapers and magazines.
The death of Benjamin the academic philosopher meant the birth of
Benjamin the cultural critic. Harvard University Press's monumental,
four-volume edition of "Selected Writings" (from which the texts of
the two new books have, for the most part, been taken) allows the
reader to chart Benjamin's change of direction and his increasing
productivity, as he began to cater to the demands of the literary
market. All of his writing from 1913 to 1926 fits into the first
volume, which is dominated by unpublished essays on abstract topics.
His first major piece of literary criticism, a long essay on Goethe's
novel "Elective Affinities," was not published until 1925. But from
the mid-nineteen-twenties onward he became more and more prolific.
The Harvard edition's second volume covers the seven years from 1927
to 1934, and two volumes are required for his last six years.
Much of Benjamin's early writing, though always stamped with his
oblique intelligence, is the small change of journalism: travel pieces,
book reviews, an article on the Berlin Food Exhibition of 1928. In
addition to giving Benjamin a precarious living, such work helped him
adapt his extremely dense style, formed in the harsh school of German
idealist philosophy, into a more appealing literary instrument. Even
so, his prose remained challenging. A friend once told him, "In great
writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and
those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant
was about one to thirty-whereas it was more like one to two in [your]
case." ("All this is correct," Benjamin admitted.)
Benjamin's roundabout methods can be seen in his best-known literary
essays, the examinations of Proust, Baudelaire, and Kafka published in
"Illuminations." These contain little of what we ordinarily expect
from criticism: biographical background, information about plot
and character, literary-historical comparisons. Instead, Benjamin
presents his subjects enigmatically, using startling metaphors and
emblems. His essay on Proust (whose works he helped translate into
German) is called "The Image of Proust," and draws an implicit parallel
between the novelist's method and the critic's, presenting Proust as a
collector of charged images, momentary glimpses that open up passages
to the buried life. "The image detaches itself from the structure
of Proust's sentences as that summer day at Balbec-old, immemorial,
mummified-emerged from the lace curtains under Francoise's hands,"
Benjamin writes. And he responds in kind, concluding his essay with
the image of Proust lying in bed, his asthmatic prostration converted
into heroic labor:
For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo's on which
the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates
the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding
them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.
Benjamin's literary criticism was too unusual and too uncompromising
to win a large audience. But his admirers included some of the best
living German writers, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt
Brecht. By 1930, Benjamin was confident enough to announce that his
life's ambition was to "be considered the foremost critic of German
literature."
It is not as a literary critic that Benjamin has been most influential,
however, but as a pioneering cultural critic, one of the first writers
to see all the products of civilization as worthy of analysis. This
is the principle that guides his most famous essay, "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," now a canonical text
in art history, film studies, and related fields. In it Benjamin
argues that, traditionally, a painting or sculpture was endowed with
something he calls "aura," deriving from a recognition of its absolute
uniqueness. That is why thousands of people line up every day for a
quick, obscured glimpse of the Mona Lisa: not just to see it but to
be in its quasi-sacred presence. In the age of technology, Benjamin
perceived, this uniqueness is diluted by the ready availability of
reproductions, which makes it possible to see a work of art without
ever having seen the original. Furthermore, in the twentieth century's
characteristic art forms, photography and film, there is no such
thing as an original.
Surprisingly, Benjamin welcomed the idea of art without aura. He
reasoned that aura was a kind of aristocratic mystery, and that its
disappearance should herald a new, more democratic art: "The social
significance of film, even-and especially-in its most positive form, is
inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation
of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage." This rhetoric,
with its enthusiasm for "destruction" and "liquidation," sounds
distinctly odd coming from Benjamin. How, the reader wonders, did
the great champion of Proust and Kafka end up decrying uniqueness and
originality? How could the man who compared "In Search of Lost Time" to
the Sistine Chapel ceiling also believe that "contemplative immersion"
in a work of art was "a breeding ground for asocial behavior"?
The answer lies in Benjamin's exceedingly awkward embrace of Marxism.
Like many other intellectuals of the time, he came to feel
that only Communism could save Europe from war, depression, and
Fascism. He visited the Soviet Union in 1926, and clung to the hope
that Communism would provide better for writers than capitalism had
managed to do. Benjamin's personal circumstances only reinforced this
judgment. Literary journalism, never a lucrative career, was an almost
heroically futile one in Weimar Germany. By 1931, Benjamin confessed
that "material circumstances . . . have made my existence-with no
property and no steady income-a paradox, in view of which even I
sometimes fall into a stupor of amazement." And when Hitler seized
power, Benjamin lost what remained of his livelihood.
In March, 1933, he fled Germany for France, never to return. For the
rest of his life, he lived on the brink of destitution. A subsidy
provided by the Institute for Social Research, itself in exile from
its original base, in Frankfurt, helped him scrape by. "My Communism,"
Benjamin said, "is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact
that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make
room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it
impossible to accommodate my life."
Benjamin's Marxist turn was welcomed by friends like Brecht, who
regretted only that he hadn't gone far enough. Scholem, on the other
hand, kept up a stream of reproaches in his letters from Palestine,
thinking it nothing more than a fashionable disguise: "There is
a disconcerting alienation and disjuncture between your true and
alleged way of thinking." And he was infuriated by Benjamin's refusal
to acknowledge how far his idiosyncratic understanding of Communism
deviated from Party orthodoxy. "The complete certainty I have about
what would happen to your writing if it occurred to you to present
it within the Communist Party is quite depressing," Scholem wrote.
Benjamin never did join the Party, though he agonized over it, just as
he continually postponed his often declared plans to learn Hebrew and
move to Palestine. But his limited and private adherence to Marxist
principles had significant effects on his work-effects that tended
to bear out Scholem's pessimism. "The Work of Art" could not have
been written without Benjamin's newfound interest in the material
conditions of cultural production. Yet his masochistic insistence on
putting his work at the service of the class struggle also accounts
for the forced belligerence and brutalism of that essay.
The most significant casualty of Benjamin's Marxism was "The Arcades
Project," which today enjoys a reputation as one of the most famous
books never written. It was the white whale of Benjamin's last
years, a magnum opus of stupendous scope and originality that he
found himself perpetually unable to finish. The Passagenwerk, as
Benjamin referred to it, took its name from the passages, or arcades,
that adorned Paris in the age of Baudelaire. These were glass-covered
promenades set aside for shopping and strolling, which helped to give
the city its reputation as a paradise for flâneurs. In the arcades of
nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin believed he had found the omphalos
of the modern city, with its erotic anonymity, its phantasmagoria of
fashions, its mixture of banality and enchantment.
The passages appealed to him, above all, because by his own day they
were already extinct, made obsolete by the department store. This
gave them the charm that Benjamin found in everything discarded
and superseded, all the detritus on which civilization imprints its
deepest secrets. "To someone looking through piles of old letters,"
he wrote, "a stamp that has long been out of circulation on a torn
envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages." In just
this way, Benjamin dreamed of using the arcades to write the hidden
history of the city he called, in one essay, "Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century." He initially meant his arcades essay to be
brief, allusive, and literary-"a fairy-play," he called it in 1928.
"In any case," he assured Scholem, "it is a project that will just
take a few weeks."
What transformed the essay of 1928 into the thousand-page midden of
notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin left behind at his
death, and that was published in 1999 under the title "The Arcades
Project"? Any answer would have to include Benjamin's constant
tendency to procrastinate; the disordered conditions of his life
in the nineteen-thirties, which made sustained research difficult;
and the inherently elusive nature of what he was trying to accomplish.
Above all, however, what kept him from completing the project was his
Marxism. In the late thirties, when he returned to it in earnest, he
was determined to recast his analysis of nineteenth-century Paris in
the language of dialectical materialism. It was in support of this
project that the Institute for Social Research granted Benjamin a
subsidy, expecting a brilliant example of Marxist cultural criticism.
But when Benjamin started to put "The Arcades Project" in something
like publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled "The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," he was in for a shock.
Although he was eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it
proved far too clumsy for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead
of sharpening his vision of Paris, Marxism had settled over it
like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude cliches. (For instance, he
interpreted Baudelaire's great poem about drunkenness, "The Ragpickers'
Wine," as a response to the wine tax.) In a devastating letter,
Adorno said that, by using "materialist categories," Benjamin had
"denied yourself your boldest and most productive thoughts in a kind
of precensorship." Adorno's judgment echoed Scholem's: Benjamin's
Marxist vocabulary had betrayed his true insights.
This rejection, coming from a representative of Benjamin's last
remaining sponsor, was a terrible blow. The timing made it even
worse: he had worked through the fall of 1938 to finish the essay,
believing that war could break out at any moment. "I was in a race
against the war," he told Adorno, who was then living in New York,
"and in spite of all my choking fear, I felt a feeling of triumph on
the day I wrapped up . . . before the end of the world (the fragility
of a manuscript!)." Now he was being told that the triumph was
illusory, that the Arcades Project could not be written on the terms
he proposed. Even if Benjamin had lived long enough, it is doubtful
that he could have completed it. The intellectual and ideological
basis of the work was in ruins.
In any case, history was not to give him the chance. Despite his
friends' attempts to persuade him to emigrate to England or America,
Benjamin was still in Paris in the summer of 1940, when the evil he
had fled in Berlin caught up with him. The fall of France set the
stage for a secular martyrdom that is a large part of his legend. The
exact details are disputed, but it seems that, on September 26,
1940, Benjamin was part of a group of refugees trying to cross the
Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. But the Spanish border guards,
perhaps out of deference to the Gestapo, did not honor their visas
and turned them back. In despair and exhaustion, Benjamin took an
overdose of morphine. The next morning, the guards relented, and the
rest of the party escaped over the border. Only Benjamin, buried in the
cemetery at Port Bou, remained as an exemplary victim-a reproach to a
Europe intent on murdering its Jews, its radicals, and its best minds.
Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius? A
reader who turns to "On Hashish" for a clear answer may be
disappointed. Like a small-scale version of "The Arcades Project,"
it is the placeholder for a book he could never finish, a ruin
occupying the site where he planned a monument, and, as such, it has
to be carefully interpreted. This is entirely fitting, since Benjamin
himself believed that "all human knowledge, if it can be justified,
must take on no other form than that of interpretation."
The most common kind of interpretation, of course, is reading. So
deeply ingrained is our association of the two that reading provides
a metaphor for many activities that have nothing to do with written
texts: the fortune-teller "reads" palms, the astrologer "reads" the
stars. The intellectual quest that defined Benjamin's work-at times,
it seems, the dare that he set himself-was to find out how much of
the world could be "read" in this way. In "The Arcades Project," he
made lengthy catalogues of ephemera-advertising posters, shop-window
displays, clothing fashions-commenting, "Whoever understands how to
read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents
in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions."
The suspicion that everything in the world carries a hidden message
seems to have come to Benjamin at a very young age. "Berlin Childhood
Around 1900" is organized as a series of vignettes, each devoted to
a thing or a place from his childhood: "The Telephone," "The Sock,"
"At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner." The result is an eerily
depopulated memoir, in which Benjamin's parents are mute presences,
and friends are almost entirely absent. Benjamin told Scholem that
the project contained "the most precise portrait I shall ever be
able to give of myself," and yet it is a portrait in which the sitter
never appears, his place taken by the objects that surround him. The
effect is not just to make Benjamin seem like a lonely, wary child,
though he undoubtedly was. Rather, if Benjamin luxuriates in memories
of solitude, sleepiness, and sickness, it is because these unguarded
states allowed him to communicate most intimately with the objects
around him. "Everything in the courtyard became a sign or hint to me,"
he writes in the section titled "Loggias." "Many were the messages
embedded in the skirmishing of the green roller blinds drawn up high,
and many the ominous dispatches that I prudently left unopened in the
rattling of the roll-up shutters that came thundering down at dusk."
Benjamin always hoped to turn his powers of reading to even more
tempting and obscure kinds of signs-astrology fascinated him-and his
willingness to indulge such ideas hints at the metaphysical, even
mystical inspiration that is at the heart of all his work, especially
his understanding of language. This affinity for the mystical was
evident to Scholem, who described Benjamin's work as "an often puzzling
juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological
and the materialistic," but it is not easy for modern readers to
embrace. The theological side of Benjamin's thought remained hidden,
during his lifetime and long afterward, in part because he chose to
hide it. He never published the seminal 1916 essay "On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man," which explicitly set forth his mystical
vision of language, or later writings that show its continued hold on
his imagination. Only with the publication of the "Selected Writings"
has it been possible for English readers to grasp the crucial fact
that the "metaphysical-theological" element of Benjamin's thought
was older and more profound than the "materialistic" element.
Benjamin's essay "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"
states, "There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate
nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is the
nature of each one to communicate its mental contents." Everything
in the world-stars, faces, animals, landscapes-has a meaning, and
Benjamin accepts that this implies the existence of a cosmic author.
"God," he declares, "made things knowable in their names." Of course,
secular reason holds that human languages are purely conventional,
but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that words are arbitrary:
"It is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language
maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object."
Instead, he holds that every human language is really a failed and
garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things:
"It is the translation of the language of things into that of man."
The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely
because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so
eloquently his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents
itself as mere chaos. This longing drew him, slowly and equivocally,
to hashish. In a hashish trance, he hoped, it would be possible to
understand the language of things more directly than in ordinary
life-to experience a universe suffused with meaning.
By the time Benjamin tried drugs, he had been reading and wondering
about them for years, and when the moment finally came it proved to
be a letdown, at least in the philosophical sense. This is not to
say that Benjamin did not experience, and enjoy, all the usual effects.
He felt mellow. "Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive
anxiety complexes," he noted during his first attempt. He saw weird
visions, such as "a long gallery of suits of armor with no one in
them. No heads, but only flames playing around the neck openings." He
even got the munchies: "I had been suddenly unable to still the pangs
of hunger that overwhelmed me late one night in my room. It seemed
advisable to buy a bar of chocolate."
But what Benjamin called "the great hope, desire, yearning to
reach-in a state of intoxication-the new, the untouched" remained
elusive. When the effects of the drugs wore off, so did the feeling
of "having suddenly penetrated, with their help, that most hidden,
generally most inaccessible world of surfaces." All that remained
was the cryptic comments and gestures recorded in the protocols, the
ludicrous corpses of what had seemed vital insights. In a session on
April 18, 1931, Fritz Frankel, a doctor who administered the drug to
Benjamin, noted, "Arm and index finger are raised high in the air,
without support. The raising of the arm is 'the birth of the kingdom
of Armenia.' " During another trance, Benjamin was very excited to
have come up with the phrase "Wellen schwappen-Wappen schwellen"
("Waves splash-armorial bearings swell"), claiming that the rhyming
words held the clue to a deep structural connection between waves and
the designs used in heraldry. "The subject holds forth in learned
fashion," Frankel noted. " 'Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua.' "
Frankel may have known the meaning of the Latin phrase-"Insofar as
it is in images, it is in language"-but he could not have recognized
how crucial the notion was to Benjamin's thought, or how tremendously
significant the nonsense phrase must have appeared to him. Under the
influence of hashish, he felt that names and things belonged together,
that a rhyme had revealed a reality.
The tragedy, or perhaps the comedy, was that this insight, the crown
of Benjamin's philosophical labor, could not survive the trance
that fathered it. In the cold light of the morning after, Wellen
schwappen-Wappen schwellen is a meaningless jingle, and the raising
of an arm has no perceptible connection to the kingdom of Armenia.
"What we are on the verge of talking about seems infinitely alluring,"
Benjamin wrote resignedly. "We stretch out our arms full of love,
eager to embrace what we have in mind. Scarcely have we touched
it, however, than it disillusions us completely. The object of our
attention suddenly fades at the touch of language." Hashish, like an
evil genie in a fairy tale, granted Benjamin's wish, but guaranteed
that he couldn't enjoy it.
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. The allure of his thought lies in his imagination of
a perfected world, in which objects would be redeemed-to use one of
his favorite words-from their imprisoning silence. Borrowing from
the Jewish tradition, Benjamin sometimes imagined this redemption as
messianic; later in his career, he often cast it in Marxist terms,
seeing redemption as revolution. He clung to these hopes more and
more passionately the more terrifying the world around him became.
The last sentence of his last major essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of
History"-written in 1940, when Nazism seemed unstoppable-insists that
even at the darkest hour redemption remains possible, that every second
is "the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter."
Hashish, by granting a vision of this redemption in such a compromised
and transient form, forces us to confront the likelihood that it was
never anything more than a fantasy. If Benjamin discovered a mystic
language in his hashish trance, it is because he so fervently wanted to
discover it. And something similar holds true for all his messianic
speculations. The beguiling complexity of his work, built out of
profound insights into language, thought, art, and society, makes it
tempting to ignore the difficulty of actually dwelling inside it. After
all, if the world is not a text because it does not have an author,
then Benjamin is not an interpreter but a poet, creating meanings
rather than perceiving them. Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works
are best read as fragments of a great poem-the poem of a longing that
no world, and Benjamin's least of all, could possibly satisfy.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/a rticles/060821crbo_books
--Boundary_(ID_+3E8YCaHN VEtNEsqmD+4cA)--
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
By Adam Kirsch
New Yorker
Aug. 14, 2006
What drugs taught Walter Benjamin.
On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin
began writing a memorandum titled "Main Features of My First Impression
of Hashish." It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he
thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug
but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and
the streets he wandered-like life itself-hashish was important to
him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.
For a writer with Benjamin's interests and allegiances, a rendezvous
with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took
him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919,
he had been fascinated by Baudelaire's "Artificial Paradises," in
which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that
they sound like invitations: "You know that hashish always evokes
magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions,
cascades of liquid gold." Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one
of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book's
"childlike innocence and purity," but was disappointed in its lack
of philosophical rigor, noting, "It will be necessary to repeat this
attempt independently." The notes from his first hashish trance show
him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. "The gates to
a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening," he wrote. "Only, I don't
wish to enter." According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin
smoked opium on several occasions, "Benjamin was a smoker who refused
the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn't want to yield to
it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation."
Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions
as either subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude
toward drugs remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them
when he was alone, and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor
friends to procure hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The
sessions were recorded in "protocols," furnishing raw material for
what Benjamin intended to be a major book on the philosophical and
psychological implications of drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom
Scholem, his best friend from the age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then
forty, listed four unwritten books that he considered "large-scale
defeats"-evidence of the "ruin or catastrophe" that his career had
become-the last was a "truly exceptional book about hashish."
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, a book by Walter Benjamin
called "On Hashish" has finally appeared in English, along with another
long-gestated work, "Berlin Childhood Around 1900" (Harvard; $14.95
each). "On Hashish" is not, however, the "truly exceptional book"
he had in mind; it's a miscellany, gathering the protocols of his
drug experiments, two published 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. "You hardly feel that you have been
reading criticism," Frank Kermode noted when "Illuminations," the
first English-language selection of Benjamin's writings, appeared,
in 1968. "It requires the kind of response we are accustomed to give
to works of art." "Illuminations" revealed just a few peaks from
the sunken continent of Benjamin's work, but these were enough to
establish him as a central figure in the history of modernism.
Benjamin approached every genre as a kind of laboratory for his
lifelong investigations into language, philosophy, and art, and his
ideas on these subjects are so original, and so radical in their
implications, that they remain profoundly challenging today, more
than sixty-five years after his death.
The period of Benjamin's adulthood and achievement was 1914 to 1940,
the darkest in modern European history, and, if no one ever wrote
criticism the way he did, it is because no other critic felt the
dislocations of the time so severely. Benjamin was born in Berlin
in 1892, into a prosperous Jewish family, and his expectations were
formed in the halcyon period before 1914. In "A Berlin Chronicle,"
a series of newspaper articles that make up the nucleus of "Berlin
Childhood Around 1900," he remembered the feeling of bourgeois security
that suffused the very furniture in his family's apartment:
Here reigned a species of things that was, no matter how compliantly it
bowed to the minor whims of fashion, in the main so wholly convinced of
itself and its permanence that it took no account of wear, inheritance,
or moves, remaining forever equally near to and far from its ending,
which seemed the ending of all things.
In such a home, poverty was unimaginable: "The poor? For rich children
of his generation, they lived at the back of beyond."
In time-honored fashion, Benjamin hoped to abandon the commercial
milieu of his father, a successful antiques dealer, for a more
prestigious career as an academic. By the time the First World War
began, he was already committed to a life of scholarship and, as an
opponent of the war, felt no qualms about maneuvering to get out of
military service. The best source for Benjamin's life in these years,
Gershom Scholem's moving yet unsentimental memoir, "Walter Benjamin:
The Story of a Friendship," records that the two of them stayed up
the whole night before Benjamin's draft-board medical exam, "while
Benjamin consumed vast quantities of black coffee, a practice then
followed by many young men prior to their military physicals." The
trick, calculated to simulate a weak heart, worked, and Benjamin was
able to spend the rest of the war in Switzerland, studying for his
doctorate at the University of Bern.
Scholem shared Benjamin's academic ambitions and his antiwar
convictions, and their student friendship laid the groundwork for
a lifetime of intellectual debate, most of which was to take place
by mail. The most important issue between them, from the beginning,
was Judaism, and the possibility of being a Jewish intellectual in
Germany. For Scholem, an ardent Zionist who was expelled from his
assimilated family for his views, the history of Jewish mysticism
gradually displaced mathematics and philosophy as a focus of study.
For Benjamin, however, Judaism remained more a possibility to be
imagined than a life to be lived. He never mastered its religious
practices or sacred texts, and, as he acknowledged to Scholem, "I
have come to know living Judaism in absolutely no form other than you."
The friends' divergent attitudes toward Jewishness largely
determined their subsequent careers. Neither of them entered the
German university life for which they had trained. In 1923, Scholem,
changing his first name from the German Gerhard to the Hebrew Gershom,
emigrated to Palestine, where there was no university; he planned
to support himself as a schoolteacher. As fate would have it, when
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded, shortly afterward,
he was named one of the first professors, and by the time of his
death, in 1982, he had become known as the greatest modern scholar
of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin, who remained closer to home, ended
up straying much farther from his early academic path. Having taken
his doctorate in 1919, he enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to
write his Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation required for
teaching in a German university. But even as he was researching the
thesis, which became "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," Benjamin
suspected that it would never be approved by the tradition-bound
faculty. The thesis, less a historical treatise than a philosophical
meditation on the nature of allegory, was, he bragged to Scholem,
"unmitigated chutzpah." Even worse than the possibility of being
rejected, however, was the possibility of being accepted. In February,
1925, as he prepared to submit the dissertation, Benjamin admitted,
"I dread almost everything that would result from a positive resolution
to all of this: I dread Frankfurt above all, then lectures, students,
etc." He needn't have worried. Although the dissertation contains
some of his most radical insights into language and literature, his
examiners rejected it, admitting that they couldn't understand a single
page. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, then, his career took a sharp
turn. With his parents increasingly unwilling or unable to support
him, he began to earn a living as a freelance literary journalist,
contributing to the culture sections of newspapers and magazines.
The death of Benjamin the academic philosopher meant the birth of
Benjamin the cultural critic. Harvard University Press's monumental,
four-volume edition of "Selected Writings" (from which the texts of
the two new books have, for the most part, been taken) allows the
reader to chart Benjamin's change of direction and his increasing
productivity, as he began to cater to the demands of the literary
market. All of his writing from 1913 to 1926 fits into the first
volume, which is dominated by unpublished essays on abstract topics.
His first major piece of literary criticism, a long essay on Goethe's
novel "Elective Affinities," was not published until 1925. But from
the mid-nineteen-twenties onward he became more and more prolific.
The Harvard edition's second volume covers the seven years from 1927
to 1934, and two volumes are required for his last six years.
Much of Benjamin's early writing, though always stamped with his
oblique intelligence, is the small change of journalism: travel pieces,
book reviews, an article on the Berlin Food Exhibition of 1928. In
addition to giving Benjamin a precarious living, such work helped him
adapt his extremely dense style, formed in the harsh school of German
idealist philosophy, into a more appealing literary instrument. Even
so, his prose remained challenging. A friend once told him, "In great
writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and
those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant
was about one to thirty-whereas it was more like one to two in [your]
case." ("All this is correct," Benjamin admitted.)
Benjamin's roundabout methods can be seen in his best-known literary
essays, the examinations of Proust, Baudelaire, and Kafka published in
"Illuminations." These contain little of what we ordinarily expect
from criticism: biographical background, information about plot
and character, literary-historical comparisons. Instead, Benjamin
presents his subjects enigmatically, using startling metaphors and
emblems. His essay on Proust (whose works he helped translate into
German) is called "The Image of Proust," and draws an implicit parallel
between the novelist's method and the critic's, presenting Proust as a
collector of charged images, momentary glimpses that open up passages
to the buried life. "The image detaches itself from the structure
of Proust's sentences as that summer day at Balbec-old, immemorial,
mummified-emerged from the lace curtains under Francoise's hands,"
Benjamin writes. And he responds in kind, concluding his essay with
the image of Proust lying in bed, his asthmatic prostration converted
into heroic labor:
For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo's on which
the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates
the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding
them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.
Benjamin's literary criticism was too unusual and too uncompromising
to win a large audience. But his admirers included some of the best
living German writers, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt
Brecht. By 1930, Benjamin was confident enough to announce that his
life's ambition was to "be considered the foremost critic of German
literature."
It is not as a literary critic that Benjamin has been most influential,
however, but as a pioneering cultural critic, one of the first writers
to see all the products of civilization as worthy of analysis. This
is the principle that guides his most famous essay, "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," now a canonical text
in art history, film studies, and related fields. In it Benjamin
argues that, traditionally, a painting or sculpture was endowed with
something he calls "aura," deriving from a recognition of its absolute
uniqueness. That is why thousands of people line up every day for a
quick, obscured glimpse of the Mona Lisa: not just to see it but to
be in its quasi-sacred presence. In the age of technology, Benjamin
perceived, this uniqueness is diluted by the ready availability of
reproductions, which makes it possible to see a work of art without
ever having seen the original. Furthermore, in the twentieth century's
characteristic art forms, photography and film, there is no such
thing as an original.
Surprisingly, Benjamin welcomed the idea of art without aura. He
reasoned that aura was a kind of aristocratic mystery, and that its
disappearance should herald a new, more democratic art: "The social
significance of film, even-and especially-in its most positive form, is
inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation
of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage." This rhetoric,
with its enthusiasm for "destruction" and "liquidation," sounds
distinctly odd coming from Benjamin. How, the reader wonders, did
the great champion of Proust and Kafka end up decrying uniqueness and
originality? How could the man who compared "In Search of Lost Time" to
the Sistine Chapel ceiling also believe that "contemplative immersion"
in a work of art was "a breeding ground for asocial behavior"?
The answer lies in Benjamin's exceedingly awkward embrace of Marxism.
Like many other intellectuals of the time, he came to feel
that only Communism could save Europe from war, depression, and
Fascism. He visited the Soviet Union in 1926, and clung to the hope
that Communism would provide better for writers than capitalism had
managed to do. Benjamin's personal circumstances only reinforced this
judgment. Literary journalism, never a lucrative career, was an almost
heroically futile one in Weimar Germany. By 1931, Benjamin confessed
that "material circumstances . . . have made my existence-with no
property and no steady income-a paradox, in view of which even I
sometimes fall into a stupor of amazement." And when Hitler seized
power, Benjamin lost what remained of his livelihood.
In March, 1933, he fled Germany for France, never to return. For the
rest of his life, he lived on the brink of destitution. A subsidy
provided by the Institute for Social Research, itself in exile from
its original base, in Frankfurt, helped him scrape by. "My Communism,"
Benjamin said, "is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact
that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make
room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it
impossible to accommodate my life."
Benjamin's Marxist turn was welcomed by friends like Brecht, who
regretted only that he hadn't gone far enough. Scholem, on the other
hand, kept up a stream of reproaches in his letters from Palestine,
thinking it nothing more than a fashionable disguise: "There is
a disconcerting alienation and disjuncture between your true and
alleged way of thinking." And he was infuriated by Benjamin's refusal
to acknowledge how far his idiosyncratic understanding of Communism
deviated from Party orthodoxy. "The complete certainty I have about
what would happen to your writing if it occurred to you to present
it within the Communist Party is quite depressing," Scholem wrote.
Benjamin never did join the Party, though he agonized over it, just as
he continually postponed his often declared plans to learn Hebrew and
move to Palestine. But his limited and private adherence to Marxist
principles had significant effects on his work-effects that tended
to bear out Scholem's pessimism. "The Work of Art" could not have
been written without Benjamin's newfound interest in the material
conditions of cultural production. Yet his masochistic insistence on
putting his work at the service of the class struggle also accounts
for the forced belligerence and brutalism of that essay.
The most significant casualty of Benjamin's Marxism was "The Arcades
Project," which today enjoys a reputation as one of the most famous
books never written. It was the white whale of Benjamin's last
years, a magnum opus of stupendous scope and originality that he
found himself perpetually unable to finish. The Passagenwerk, as
Benjamin referred to it, took its name from the passages, or arcades,
that adorned Paris in the age of Baudelaire. These were glass-covered
promenades set aside for shopping and strolling, which helped to give
the city its reputation as a paradise for flâneurs. In the arcades of
nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin believed he had found the omphalos
of the modern city, with its erotic anonymity, its phantasmagoria of
fashions, its mixture of banality and enchantment.
The passages appealed to him, above all, because by his own day they
were already extinct, made obsolete by the department store. This
gave them the charm that Benjamin found in everything discarded
and superseded, all the detritus on which civilization imprints its
deepest secrets. "To someone looking through piles of old letters,"
he wrote, "a stamp that has long been out of circulation on a torn
envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages." In just
this way, Benjamin dreamed of using the arcades to write the hidden
history of the city he called, in one essay, "Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century." He initially meant his arcades essay to be
brief, allusive, and literary-"a fairy-play," he called it in 1928.
"In any case," he assured Scholem, "it is a project that will just
take a few weeks."
What transformed the essay of 1928 into the thousand-page midden of
notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin left behind at his
death, and that was published in 1999 under the title "The Arcades
Project"? Any answer would have to include Benjamin's constant
tendency to procrastinate; the disordered conditions of his life
in the nineteen-thirties, which made sustained research difficult;
and the inherently elusive nature of what he was trying to accomplish.
Above all, however, what kept him from completing the project was his
Marxism. In the late thirties, when he returned to it in earnest, he
was determined to recast his analysis of nineteenth-century Paris in
the language of dialectical materialism. It was in support of this
project that the Institute for Social Research granted Benjamin a
subsidy, expecting a brilliant example of Marxist cultural criticism.
But when Benjamin started to put "The Arcades Project" in something
like publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled "The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," he was in for a shock.
Although he was eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it
proved far too clumsy for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead
of sharpening his vision of Paris, Marxism had settled over it
like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude cliches. (For instance, he
interpreted Baudelaire's great poem about drunkenness, "The Ragpickers'
Wine," as a response to the wine tax.) In a devastating letter,
Adorno said that, by using "materialist categories," Benjamin had
"denied yourself your boldest and most productive thoughts in a kind
of precensorship." Adorno's judgment echoed Scholem's: Benjamin's
Marxist vocabulary had betrayed his true insights.
This rejection, coming from a representative of Benjamin's last
remaining sponsor, was a terrible blow. The timing made it even
worse: he had worked through the fall of 1938 to finish the essay,
believing that war could break out at any moment. "I was in a race
against the war," he told Adorno, who was then living in New York,
"and in spite of all my choking fear, I felt a feeling of triumph on
the day I wrapped up . . . before the end of the world (the fragility
of a manuscript!)." Now he was being told that the triumph was
illusory, that the Arcades Project could not be written on the terms
he proposed. Even if Benjamin had lived long enough, it is doubtful
that he could have completed it. The intellectual and ideological
basis of the work was in ruins.
In any case, history was not to give him the chance. Despite his
friends' attempts to persuade him to emigrate to England or America,
Benjamin was still in Paris in the summer of 1940, when the evil he
had fled in Berlin caught up with him. The fall of France set the
stage for a secular martyrdom that is a large part of his legend. The
exact details are disputed, but it seems that, on September 26,
1940, Benjamin was part of a group of refugees trying to cross the
Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. But the Spanish border guards,
perhaps out of deference to the Gestapo, did not honor their visas
and turned them back. In despair and exhaustion, Benjamin took an
overdose of morphine. The next morning, the guards relented, and the
rest of the party escaped over the border. Only Benjamin, buried in the
cemetery at Port Bou, remained as an exemplary victim-a reproach to a
Europe intent on murdering its Jews, its radicals, and its best minds.
Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius? A
reader who turns to "On Hashish" for a clear answer may be
disappointed. Like a small-scale version of "The Arcades Project,"
it is the placeholder for a book he could never finish, a ruin
occupying the site where he planned a monument, and, as such, it has
to be carefully interpreted. This is entirely fitting, since Benjamin
himself believed that "all human knowledge, if it can be justified,
must take on no other form than that of interpretation."
The most common kind of interpretation, of course, is reading. So
deeply ingrained is our association of the two that reading provides
a metaphor for many activities that have nothing to do with written
texts: the fortune-teller "reads" palms, the astrologer "reads" the
stars. The intellectual quest that defined Benjamin's work-at times,
it seems, the dare that he set himself-was to find out how much of
the world could be "read" in this way. In "The Arcades Project," he
made lengthy catalogues of ephemera-advertising posters, shop-window
displays, clothing fashions-commenting, "Whoever understands how to
read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents
in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions."
The suspicion that everything in the world carries a hidden message
seems to have come to Benjamin at a very young age. "Berlin Childhood
Around 1900" is organized as a series of vignettes, each devoted to
a thing or a place from his childhood: "The Telephone," "The Sock,"
"At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner." The result is an eerily
depopulated memoir, in which Benjamin's parents are mute presences,
and friends are almost entirely absent. Benjamin told Scholem that
the project contained "the most precise portrait I shall ever be
able to give of myself," and yet it is a portrait in which the sitter
never appears, his place taken by the objects that surround him. The
effect is not just to make Benjamin seem like a lonely, wary child,
though he undoubtedly was. Rather, if Benjamin luxuriates in memories
of solitude, sleepiness, and sickness, it is because these unguarded
states allowed him to communicate most intimately with the objects
around him. "Everything in the courtyard became a sign or hint to me,"
he writes in the section titled "Loggias." "Many were the messages
embedded in the skirmishing of the green roller blinds drawn up high,
and many the ominous dispatches that I prudently left unopened in the
rattling of the roll-up shutters that came thundering down at dusk."
Benjamin always hoped to turn his powers of reading to even more
tempting and obscure kinds of signs-astrology fascinated him-and his
willingness to indulge such ideas hints at the metaphysical, even
mystical inspiration that is at the heart of all his work, especially
his understanding of language. This affinity for the mystical was
evident to Scholem, who described Benjamin's work as "an often puzzling
juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological
and the materialistic," but it is not easy for modern readers to
embrace. The theological side of Benjamin's thought remained hidden,
during his lifetime and long afterward, in part because he chose to
hide it. He never published the seminal 1916 essay "On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man," which explicitly set forth his mystical
vision of language, or later writings that show its continued hold on
his imagination. Only with the publication of the "Selected Writings"
has it been possible for English readers to grasp the crucial fact
that the "metaphysical-theological" element of Benjamin's thought
was older and more profound than the "materialistic" element.
Benjamin's essay "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"
states, "There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate
nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is the
nature of each one to communicate its mental contents." Everything
in the world-stars, faces, animals, landscapes-has a meaning, and
Benjamin accepts that this implies the existence of a cosmic author.
"God," he declares, "made things knowable in their names." Of course,
secular reason holds that human languages are purely conventional,
but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that words are arbitrary:
"It is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language
maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object."
Instead, he holds that every human language is really a failed and
garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things:
"It is the translation of the language of things into that of man."
The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely
because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so
eloquently his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents
itself as mere chaos. This longing drew him, slowly and equivocally,
to hashish. In a hashish trance, he hoped, it would be possible to
understand the language of things more directly than in ordinary
life-to experience a universe suffused with meaning.
By the time Benjamin tried drugs, he had been reading and wondering
about them for years, and when the moment finally came it proved to
be a letdown, at least in the philosophical sense. This is not to
say that Benjamin did not experience, and enjoy, all the usual effects.
He felt mellow. "Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive
anxiety complexes," he noted during his first attempt. He saw weird
visions, such as "a long gallery of suits of armor with no one in
them. No heads, but only flames playing around the neck openings." He
even got the munchies: "I had been suddenly unable to still the pangs
of hunger that overwhelmed me late one night in my room. It seemed
advisable to buy a bar of chocolate."
But what Benjamin called "the great hope, desire, yearning to
reach-in a state of intoxication-the new, the untouched" remained
elusive. When the effects of the drugs wore off, so did the feeling
of "having suddenly penetrated, with their help, that most hidden,
generally most inaccessible world of surfaces." All that remained
was the cryptic comments and gestures recorded in the protocols, the
ludicrous corpses of what had seemed vital insights. In a session on
April 18, 1931, Fritz Frankel, a doctor who administered the drug to
Benjamin, noted, "Arm and index finger are raised high in the air,
without support. The raising of the arm is 'the birth of the kingdom
of Armenia.' " During another trance, Benjamin was very excited to
have come up with the phrase "Wellen schwappen-Wappen schwellen"
("Waves splash-armorial bearings swell"), claiming that the rhyming
words held the clue to a deep structural connection between waves and
the designs used in heraldry. "The subject holds forth in learned
fashion," Frankel noted. " 'Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua.' "
Frankel may have known the meaning of the Latin phrase-"Insofar as
it is in images, it is in language"-but he could not have recognized
how crucial the notion was to Benjamin's thought, or how tremendously
significant the nonsense phrase must have appeared to him. Under the
influence of hashish, he felt that names and things belonged together,
that a rhyme had revealed a reality.
The tragedy, or perhaps the comedy, was that this insight, the crown
of Benjamin's philosophical labor, could not survive the trance
that fathered it. In the cold light of the morning after, Wellen
schwappen-Wappen schwellen is a meaningless jingle, and the raising
of an arm has no perceptible connection to the kingdom of Armenia.
"What we are on the verge of talking about seems infinitely alluring,"
Benjamin wrote resignedly. "We stretch out our arms full of love,
eager to embrace what we have in mind. Scarcely have we touched
it, however, than it disillusions us completely. The object of our
attention suddenly fades at the touch of language." Hashish, like an
evil genie in a fairy tale, granted Benjamin's wish, but guaranteed
that he couldn't enjoy it.
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. The allure of his thought lies in his imagination of
a perfected world, in which objects would be redeemed-to use one of
his favorite words-from their imprisoning silence. Borrowing from
the Jewish tradition, Benjamin sometimes imagined this redemption as
messianic; later in his career, he often cast it in Marxist terms,
seeing redemption as revolution. He clung to these hopes more and
more passionately the more terrifying the world around him became.
The last sentence of his last major essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of
History"-written in 1940, when Nazism seemed unstoppable-insists that
even at the darkest hour redemption remains possible, that every second
is "the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter."
Hashish, by granting a vision of this redemption in such a compromised
and transient form, forces us to confront the likelihood that it was
never anything more than a fantasy. If Benjamin discovered a mystic
language in his hashish trance, it is because he so fervently wanted to
discover it. And something similar holds true for all his messianic
speculations. The beguiling complexity of his work, built out of
profound insights into language, thought, art, and society, makes it
tempting to ignore the difficulty of actually dwelling inside it. After
all, if the world is not a text because it does not have an author,
then Benjamin is not an interpreter but a poet, creating meanings
rather than perceiving them. Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works
are best read as fragments of a great poem-the poem of a longing that
no world, and Benjamin's least of all, could possibly satisfy.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/a rticles/060821crbo_books
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress