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. 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.

"Benjamin can be perversely elusive — sometimes you wonder if you need to be on drugs to get him." Boston Globe

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.

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.

In search of heightened awareness, Benjamin would eat hashish,smoke opium and get injected with mescaline...Some of his notes (such as the partabout giggling) will be familiar to any contemporary stoner, but even when dealingwith drugs he surprises his readers...Everything Benjamin wrote, even when thesubject is less than pleasant, exudes an almost euphoric spirit. It was as if hewrote as a form of worship, out of gratitude for the chance to live and discover.

[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.

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...On Hashishis 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 Joel and Fritz Frankel--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 voyeuristic charm of On Hashishis in watching a great thinker struggle with the elisions, distortions, and sublimations that come with trying to answer, "What did it feel like?"...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...In a time when thirteen-year-olds take pills that promise instant ecstasy, Benjamin reminds us that the final relevant feeling behind modem drugs--commodities like all else--is melancholy...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.

Fascinating...On Hashishgivesthe 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 insightinto the man himself--his drives, his fears, and his creative process.

[On Hashishis] a miscellany,gathering the protocols of [Benjamin's] drug experiments, two accounts of hisexperiences, and a handful of references to drugs culled from his other works. Itcan only begin to suggest the true importance of drug experiences for thedevelopment of Benjamin's thought. Yet for this very reason OnHashishstands in the same relation to a more conventional essayon drugs as Benjamin's literary essays do to conventional criticism...What makesOn Hashishan important book is that Benjamin'sdrug experiments not only were a failure in themselves but also shifted the groundbeneath his other work in a way that he never fully acknowledged.

Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.Howard Eilandis Lecturer in Literature at <>MIT.

Translator's Foreword

Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts

"Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature,"
by Marcus Boon

Editorial Note,
by Tillman Rexroth

Protocols of Drug Experiments (1-12)

Completed Texts

"Myslovice--Braunschweig--Marseilles"

"Hashish in Marseilles"

Addenda

From One-Way Street

From "Surrealism"

From "May-June 1931"

From The Arcades Project

From the Notebooks

From the Letters

"An Experiment by Walter Benjamin," by Jean Selz

Notes

Index