On Hashish

Michael Hayward

On Hashish (Harvard), trans­lated by Howard Eiland and oth­ers, col­lects all of Walter Benjamin’s writ­ings on hashish, draw­ing on his par­tic­i­pa­tion in a series of drug exper­i­ments that took place between 1927 and 1934 in Berlin, Marseilles and Ibiza. Very lit­tle of this mate­r­ial was pub­lished dur­ing Benjamin’s life­time, although he had been plan­ning what he described as a “truly excep­tional study” on the sub­ject. The first half of this book con­tains tran­scrip­tions of the “drug pro­to­cols” them­selves: the notes made by Benjamin and his fel­low par­tic­i­pants (Ernst Bloch, philoso­pher; Jean Selz, writer; Fritz Fränkel, physi­cian; and oth­ers) while under the influ­ence of hashish. The remain­der of the book con­sists of essays on the drug’s effects, and rel­e­vant extracts from Benjamin’s other work: let­ters, note­books and sec­tions of The Arcades Project, the book con­sid­ered to be his mas­ter­piece. Benjamin saw these inves­ti­ga­tions as part of the lit­er­ary tra­di­tion of drug exper­i­men­ta­tion, a lin­eage that includes Baudelaire, Herman Hesse and (later) Aldous Huxley. Benjamin’s notes reveal unex­pected traces of poetry that invite the reader to take a closer look at the world around us: morn­ing comb­ing per­ceived as an act that “dri­ves out dreams from the hair”; an obser­va­tion that “the object of our atten­tion sud­denly fades at the touch of lan­guage”; a reflec­tion that the cre­ative act is a source of joy because it offers “the cer­tainty of unrolling an art­fully wound skein,” prompt­ing Benjamin to ask, “isn’t that the joy of all pro­duc­tiv­ity, at least in prose?”