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.
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