It would be profoundly inaccurate to consider drug use carnal, immanent; to consider drug literature phenomenological, or merely that. The comedown inspires such angst and anxiety not because it marks the liminal retreat of superhuman faculties, but because it signals the necessity of making those faculties real, of the necessity of speaking in the construction of memory and, ultimately, of identity. "What did it feel like?" is not, in drug use or in life, an external appeal to some previously internalized objectification of the past. It is rather a demand that creates that object, that creates a human animal precisely not immanent because, through cannabis or opium or LSD, he had once proved himself more than his body and less than his mind. The experimenter who fails to speak, or speaks only failingly, becomes a common junkie.

That is the first possible romance of intoxication: to be able to speak about it later. The second romance, perhaps far more romantic, is of course the opposite: to be unable to speak, to be silent not out of discursive incapability but discursive unavailability. Centuries of medical warnings and public service announcements were fated to fail: the possibility of permanent debilitation—at the limit, death—is precisely what motivates the noble user; to die intoxicated, as something not oneself, is to live forever. But the preceding is, of course, not an actual opposition. Silence is only a logical corollary of death, and logic holds little in places and people drawn to drugs. True, history is enchanted by all voices of the dead but those of the intoxicated—those anomied and overdosed who never see demise coming—are the most seductive, the most impossible.

It might be exactly in this spirit that Belknap, an imprint of Harvard University Press, has released On Hashish and Berlin Childhood around 1900, two thin volumes of writings by Walter Benjamin, perhaps still the foremost critic and sensualist of bourgeois life. On Hashish is what it says it is: Benjamin, following Baudelaire and anticipating the Beats, brings to toking and crushing and snorting the same wondrous, mystical, anti-positivist empiricism he brings to bargain-hunting and flâneurie in The Arcades Project. That both Benjamin's study of the Parisian arcade and of the hashish effect sat unfinished at his death nods to their—and his—deep appeal. For it seems that Benjamin more than anyone gets closest to the seductive impossibility of drugs, and of history: that is, the subject who overindulges and dies but somehow survives to tell the story. This sense comes not because Benjamin was a particularly ambitious drug user— On Hashish actually finds him quite prudish—but because he was the ambitious chronicler of Weimar Germany, the intoxicated dreamland that fascinates still because it has yet to make the transition to vulgar memory.

Weimar, doomed and desultory, remains a refracted kaleidoscope of impressions; interwar Europe is passion and apathy, victim and accomplice. It is not explanatory. Crucially, Benjamin survives to us in fragments, culled and translated and compiled but never finished. Again, a matter of romance: when he took that overdose of morphine on September 26, 1940, Walter Benjamin escaped the Gestapo and foreclosed the indignity of having to answer for himself. His suicide, while en route from Paris (where he was exiled) to Spain and presumably America beyond, famously meant the seizure of a suitcase containing a completed manuscript, perhaps his Arcades magnum opus. It was lost to history; it became history.

On Hashish contains no Nazis. Unlike The Arcades Project, which Belknap triumphantly published in English in 1999, it is not a thousand-page rumination on modernity or capitalism or the transformations of the nineteenth century. But it is a symptom of all those things, and though Benjamin himself might be quite embarrassed at the truncated form in which it exists today, admirers of both the pleasures of psychotropics and the entanglements of florid, semi-lucid prose will find it a text of inordinate, if not entirely enunciable, interest.

Fragmentary and scattershot—the slim book seems the work of a small army of editors, translators, and researchers— On Hashish is built around twelve "protocols," short accounts of drug experiments undertaken between 1927 and 1934. Benjamin's own notes are joined by those of his compatriots—the philosopher Ernst Bloch and the physicians Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel—and one of the particular pleasures of the volume is reading the events of the same drug-addled evening though voices both under the influence and assuredly sober. The four men, in various configurations and joined by others at various times in Berlin, Marseilles, and Ibiza, seek to answer quasi-scientifically, "What does it feel like to eat hashish?"; like many an amateur pusher, their failure to do so results from a developed weakness for the merchandise. But if these notes for a "truly exceptional book about hashish"—a book about the general, universal effects of hashish—fail as such, they yield something quite more interesting: a deeply personal approach to the question, "What did it feel like?"

The compilers at Belknap do a marvelous service in incandescing this distinction: this is not a book about hashish, the unwritten book Benjamin "came to consider one of his large-scale defeats," but one on hashish, in both senses of the phrase. The voyeuristic charm of On Hashish is in watching a great thinker struggle with the elisions, distortions, and sublimations that come with trying to answer, "What did it feel like?" Of his "second impression of hashish," Benjamin notes, "[I]t is the murky, alien, exotic aspects of the intoxication that remain in my memory, not the bright ones." Writing after the fact, his instincts as philosopher and critic go towards the grandiose: "A formula for the nearness of death came to me yesterday: death lies between me and my intoxication."

Perhaps. But there is another Benjamin in these pages, no less challenging. It is the Benjamin of the "first impression of hashish," clearly written as the drug was still active ("boundless goodwill," he notes), but most of all, it is the intoxicated Benjamin revealed in his friends' accounts, the Benjamin of a certain hysterical, verbose brightness. Fritz Fränkel quotes him in notes dated April 18, 1931; after eating "1.0 gram," the "test subject [Benjamin] wishes that the protocol-writer [Fränkel] not address him in the familiar ' du .' The reason for this: 'I am not I; I am the hashish at certain moments.'" "It is a law," Benjamin tells Fränkel, "There is a hashish effect only when one speaks about the hashish."

Benjamin's drug ramblings are not always so meaningful—consider "when someone has done something good, then perhaps that good deed becomes the eye of a bird"—but between his insights during intoxication and those written after seems to lie an irrecoverable lacuna of space-time: the moment of total feeling that is entirely internal, entirely subjective; the drug moment, with its pipes and smoke and syringes in all their glory. After the instant, memory cements itself in metaphor: "It was as if," Benjamin remembers afterwards, "I were in flight from Kafka's spirit, and now at the moment he touched me, I was transformed into stone, like Daphne turning into ivy at Apollo's touch." But the moment of touch is irretrievable even at that moment. When the user becomes the hashish, who remembers whom? This is why Benjamin can only be affected once he speaks about the effects; in speaking, the proper subject is reinstated, though of course the experience is already lost to him. A product of the melting of user-subject and drug-object, the instant of intoxication was never truly his. Might death be as near as the inevitable failure of words?

In his unexceptional introductory essay "Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature," Marcus Boon ties Benjamin's experimentation to a failed "left-wing politics of intoxication," to the search for a "materialist magic that would provide a key tool for the transfiguration of modernity—a transfiguration that he achieved in his writing." This seems inarguable; the grandeur of Benjamin's prose, even in translation—the way his sentences cyclically veil and reveal themselves in an ether of openhearted irony—will suffer many a reader's fawning, stoned attempt at replication. No one "speaks about the hashish" quite so beautifully.

But merely situating Benjamin among the libertines, the pharmacologists and the canon of his day does little to explain his peculiar predicament of approaching the drug world as the principle prophet and mystic of mature capitalism. Boon hints at this role when he writes of Benjamin's "early insight into the commodity form as a drug-like hallucination," but the point deserves sharpening; Benjamin was the Marxist who made the market, and the society it implied, magical. Drugs in the early twentieth century were, like today, not quite licit commodities, but commodities they were—and, with opium and hashish prime colonial imports from the Orient, rather ideologically fraught ones at that. Baudelaire and Balzac, Poe and Kerouac, might all have believed their drug experiences to be emancipatory, but one suspects that Benjamin was never so naïve, never so trusting of euphoria.

On Hashish is a stormy text; authors interject and circle back on one another, and it is often difficult to tell just who is writing. The most problematic interlopers, however, are neither the eager physician friends nor the stolid present-day commentators, but rather the thirty pages of "Addenda" that aim to trace the influence of drug use in Benjamin's oeuvre by presenting barely adequate excerpts from his other works. The editors' decision here—to essentially reprint every occurrence of "hashish" in Benjamin's collected works—is ultimately self-undermining. Perhaps made natural through the influence of sixties psychedelia or current libertarianism, the idea of delimiting a category of "Benjamin's drug writings" in fact seems to run precisely counter to the most stunning passages of the 1927-34 Weimar hashish protocols. That is to say, drugs were a limiting case, not a special one.

Happily, the technical proficiency of the Belknap edition—particularly Howard Eiland's supple translation of the protocols themselves—makes this clear, overriding even the dubiousness of some of its more peripheral inclusions. Benjamin succeeds in intimating, through his haze and ours, that intoxication qua intoxication is only the limiting case of intoxication in general; altered consciousness, only the limiting case of (false) consciousness in general. The modern drug user is not, like his tribal equivalent, a shaman or conjurer contacting another realm; in the age of mechanical reproduction, drugs make us feel alive because they shrink down our entire modern lives—filled with the irretrievability of memory and the inadequacy of words—into single recreational evenings of microcosmic import. They are not escapes. In a time when thirteen-year-olds take pills that promise instant ecstasy, Benjamin reminds us that the final relevant feeling behind modern drugs—commodities like all else—is melancholy .

"The unpleasant feeling," Benjamin writes, "of wanting simultaneously to be alone and to be with others, a feeling that manifests itself in a deeper sense of fatigue and has to be acquiesced in: this feeling grows in intensity. You have the feeling of needing to be alone, so as to give yourself over in deeper peace of mind to this ambiguous wink from nirvana; and at the same time, you need the presence of others, like gently shifting relief-figures on the plinth of your own throne. Hope as a pillow that—only now—lies under your head, with lasting effect." Those under the influence would likely be astonished by the economy and accuracy with which Benjamin here encapsulates the cannabis experience—their glee and admiration lasts until they realize he might just capture the whole of the modern condition as well.

No, there are no Nazis in On Hashish, but the impossibility of Weimar hangs thick like smoke and seems to foretell our own. If Marx was the first to see intoxication in the masses, Benjamin—a most renegade interpreter—is the first to consider it generously, to consider that nirvana indeed winks in the skylights of shopping arcades and the shafts of opium pipes. The modern drug user is not an addict; he is the epochal melancholic, like all of us fatigued, wanting to be left alone and to be a part of something greater, like all of us mourning the impossibility of describing experience and fearing, knowing, that experience only becomes real in the describing. On Hashish , in which we follow Benjamin restlessly around Europe, into anonymous boarding rooms and neighborhood bistros (he orders the entire menu in one), says nothing novel about hashish or any drug for that matter; nonetheless, as an elegant evocation of intoxication—in its full glorious, ghastly scope—it might reveal things even its author, brilliant and doomed, never intended.

Berlin Childhood around 1900, the second small book released by Belknap, is a product of the same period and the same instinct as On Hashish . If it feels ultimately less exceptional, that may be due to its much further state of completion. In Berlin Childhood , melancholy and the Fascist menace are explicitly placed in the foreground; Benjamin's hazy nostalgia would approach sentimentality if it didn't so tragically admit itself as a salvage mission: "In 1932," Benjamin writes on his first page, "when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting, farewell to the city of my birth." Like Freud's Vienna , Berlin had indeed been permanently stripped from one of its most defining citizens.

As "Hope in the Past," Peter Szondi's long and learned introduction, explains, Berlin Childhood owes no small amount of debt to Proust, for whom Benjamin served as a translator. Yet some fifty years after its posthumous publication in German, this tidy volume of urban vignettes—memories of imperial landmarks and family vacations, school libraries and the arrival of the household telephone—has earned its own afterlife. The later writings of Roland Barthes are obvious descendents, and even Jacques Derrida's final fixations on hospitality and his native Algeria bear its trace, however unconsciously. Even as the twentieth century killed the author, a certain alter-ego—the knowing, curious boy—has emerged as a viable agent of philosophical inquiry; Benjamin's version—sickly, bookish, romantic—is quite like any other.

Yet, perhaps the anxiety of speaking the half-remembered, of hoarding personal history against the ravages of age and the ages, necessitates a clarion individuation. Certainly, the boy Benjamin elicits in his successor some of the most marvelous performances of a master stylist. A sketch titled "Sexual Awakening" (again, translated by Eiland) ends in gradual, bittersweet diminuendo: "Suddenly, in the midst of my perplexity and dismay I was overcome by a burning wave of anxiety, but also, at the very same moment and even before this other feeling had ebbed, by a second wave, this one of utter indifference. And the two waves converged irresistibly in a dawning sensation of pleasure, wherein the profanation of a holy day combined with the pandering of the street, which here, for the first time, gave me an inkling of the services it was prepared to render to awakened instincts."

If such pristine words ring false for an actual eight-year-old boy, they are entirely right for Benjamin's collapse of coming-of-age drama and fin-de-siècle transformation onto a single palimpsest of wistful melancholy. Though Berlin Childhood is in many ways the more substantive work, its sensuous qualities can't help but lead one to regard it as the true addendum to On Hashish . Of course, no son of a respectable Jewish family in 1900 Berlin would be caught indulging in drugs, or at least the grown hashish-eater and exiled intellectual of 1932 would not remember such improprieties. Berlin Childhood around 1900 finally functions like all excavations of lost time: the little boy may be innocent, the remembered milieu yet to be complicated, but the effect is unquestionably narcotic . If nothing else, the new translations of Benjamin leave precisely that to the contemporary reader: modern intoxication is polymorphous; the comedowns are devastating and can last a lifetime.

 

Jonathan Liu '07 is the Book Review's resident fun czar.