benjamin on hachich

8/2/2019 Benjamin on Hachich

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O n H a s h i s h

Walter Benjamin

Translated by Howard Eiland and Others

with an introductory essay by marcus boon

the belknap press of harvard university press

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England

2006


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Copyright 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Additional copyright notices and the Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication dataappear on pages 181183, which constitute an extension of the copyright page.


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Contents

Translators Foreword vii

Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts xiii

Walter Benjamin andDrugLiterature, byMarcusBoon 1

Editorial Note,byTillmanRexroth 13

Protocols ofDrugExperiments (112) 17

CompletedTexts

MysloviceBraunschweigMarseilles 105

Hashish in Marseilles 117

Addenda

From One-Way Street 129

From Surrealism 132

From MayJune 1931 135

From The Arcades Project 136

From the Notebooks 142

From the Letters 144

An Experiment by Walter Benjamin, by Jean Selz 147

Notes 159

Index 171


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Translators Foreword

t h e d r u g e x p er i m e nt s documented in this volume took place

in the years 1927 to 1934 in Berlin, Marseilles, and Ibiza. Along withWalter Benjamin, the participants included, at various times, the

philosopher Ernst Bloch, the writer Jean Selz, the physicians Ernst

Jol, Fritz Frnkel, and Egon Wissing, and Egons wife Gert

Wissing. Originally recruited as a test subject by Jol and Frnkel,

who were doing research on narcotics, Benjamin experimented with

several different drugs: he ate hashish, smoked opium, and allowed

himself to be injected subcutaneously with mescaline and the opiate

eucodal. Records of the experimentsthey were very loosely orga-

nizedwere kept in the form of drug protocols. Some of these ac-

counts were written down in the course of the experiments, while

others seem to have been compiled afterward on the basis of notes

and personal recollection. Benjamin also took hashish in solitude, as

witness the three accounts of an intoxicated evening in Marseilles.

He took these drugs, which he looked on as poison, for the sake of

the knowledge to be gained from their use. As he said to his friend

Gershom Scholem in a letter of January 30, 1928, The notes I made

[concerning the first two experiments with hashish] . . . may well

turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical ob-

servations, with which they are most intimately related, as are to a

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certain extent even my experiences under the influence of the drug.

As an initiation into what he called profane illumination, the drug

experiments were part of his lifelong effort to broaden the concept of

experience.

During those last years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin was

meditating a book on hashisha truly exceptional study, he tells

Scholemwhich, however, remained unrealized, and which he came

to consider one of his large-scale defeats. No doubt this book would

have differed from the loose collection of drug protocols and feuille-ton pieces published posthumously in 1972 under the title ber

Haschisch, and reprinted in 1985, slightly emended and expanded,

in Volume 6 of Benjamins Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writ-

ings), source of the present translation. Although we have nothing

to indicate specific plans in this regard, it is tempting to think of

the drug protocols as a detailed blueprint for the construction of

the projected volume; despite their fragmentary character, they artic-

ulate the gamut of motifs with which the book might well have

been concerned. They are in fact highly readable texts, those by

Benjamins colleaguesin which he is described and quotedno less

than his own, and their documentary notebook quality is not un-

related to the literary montage of some of Benjamins more im-

portant later works, such as The Arcades Project(into which he incor-

porated passages from the protocols) and Central Park. The

notational style, moreover, is a reflection of the discontinuous and as

it were pointillistic character of the drug experiences themselves,

which Benjamin likens to a toe dance of reason.

The philosophical immersion that intoxicants afforded Walter

Benjamin was not Symbolist derangement of the senses, then, but

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transformation of reason. Which is to say: transformation of the tra-

ditional logic of noncontradiction and the traditional principle of

identity. Like the Surrealists, with whose works he was critically en-

gaged during the 1920s, Benjamin sought to infuse thinking with the

energies of dreambut in the interests of a wakingdream. In a state

of intoxication, the thread of ratiocination is loosened, unraveled, not

dissolved; with the emptying out of personality, there is a diffusion of

perspective. Thinking is sensualized. A mimetic power holds sway in

the realm of perception, the realm of image space, in all its plasticity.The intoxicated man takes the part of things around him, becoming,

like the physiognomic flneur or the child at play, a virtuoso of empa-

thy (another dangerous drug), and at the same time, with utter de-

tachment, drawing objects and events into his thickening web. The

drug weaves time and space together in a manifold resonant fabric,

an interpenetrating and superposed transparency of (historical) mo-

ments: what Benjamin, with a touch of the humor that is integral to

hashish, terms the colportage phenomenon of space. This involves

the disclosure of unexpected stations in a familiar milieu, of many

places in one place.

The feeling of loneliness is very quickly lost. My walking stick be-

gins to give me a special pleasure. The handle of a coffeepot used

here suddenly looks very large and moreover remains so. (One be-

comes so tender, fears that a shadow falling on the paper might

hurt it. . . . One reads the notices on the urinals.)

I immersed myself in intimate contemplation of the sidewalk be-

fore me, which, through a kind of unguent (a magic unguent)

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which I spread over it, could have beenpreciselyas these very

stonesalso the sidewalk of Paris.

As she danced, I drank in every line she set in motion. . . . Many

identities passed over her back like fog over the night sky. When

she danced with Egon, she was a slender, black-caparisoned

youth; they both executed extravagant figures there in the room.

. . . The window at her back was black and empty; through its

frame the centuries entered by jolts, while with each of her move-

mentsso I told hershe took up a destiny or let it fall.

There is an analogy here to what the flneur experiences (and the

colportage phenomenon of space is said to be the flneurs basic ex-

perience) when he sees the ghost of a barricade on a modern Paris

streetthat is, when far-off times and places interpenetrate the ur-

ban landscape and the present moment, creating for him a kind of

historical palimpsest. And there is a further analogy to the way the

film camera reveals heretofore unknown corners of the common-

place, in a room, an object, or a face. In the metamorphic masquer-

ade-world of hashish, its moods recurrently intimating the nearness

of death, each particularity wears a face, or rather several faces, and

through the reigning ambiguity everything becomes a matter of nu-

ance, multivalence.

A defining feature of the drug experiences, which are always repre-

sented in terms of phases, is the fleeting character of the individual

moments. All sensations have a steeper gradient. One consequence

of this heightened velocity of thought is a certain inevitable resigna-

tion on the part of the test subject, an automatic displacement of at-

tention and a necessary obliquity. The subject can never say what has

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really moved him during the experiment. Yet, according to Benjamin,

there is a hashish effect only when one speaks about the hashish. In

the rush of intoxication, the attention of the subject is deflected from

the main object of his experience, which is inexpressible, to some in-

cidental object, which, though truncated, may prove more profound

than what he would have liked to say at first. In this way, the intoxi-

cated subject is carried along in the punctuated flow of perceptions,

one image suddenly merging into the next, as in a film, and the sense

of immense oceanic dimensions of time and space opening out iscountered by the constantly changing focus on the smallest and most

random contingencies. Hence, in his 1929 essay Surrealism, Ben-

jamin can speak of the dialectical nature of intoxication, of a disci-

plined, illuminated intoxication conducing to a deepened sobriety, at

once concentrated and expansive. In the dialectics of intoxication,

the threshold between waking and sleeping is worn away. (Every

image is a sleep in itself, reads one of the undated notes on hashish.)

At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin, is a new way of seeing, a

new concreteness in relation to history and the everydayperception

more stratified and richer in spaces (Arcades Project, P1a,2). The

Surrealism essay goes on to ask about the conditions under which

such liberated experience can be the basis for political liberation.

A word about Benjamins central term in the drug writings. Rausch is

an important concept in the later philosophy of Nietzsche, where it

designates that Dionysian knowledge which was crucial for the

young Benjamin and his whole generation. The idea of the consum-

ing intoxication of creation, Rausch as a state of transport embody-

ing the highest intellectual clarity, plays a role in Benjamins dialogue

on aesthetics, The Rainbow, of 1915. The term is rendered in this

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volume mainly as intoxication or trance, neither an entirely satis-

factory translation. The noun Rausch comes from the onomatopoeic

verb rauschen, to rustle; rush; roar; thunder; murmur. The English

word rush, cognate with rauschen, actually brings out a significant

aspect of the German concept (the relevance of velocity touched on

above), not to mention its usage in the argot of the 1960s drug cul-

ture, where it meant an intensification of intoxication. The French

term ivresse, with its literary associations in Symbolism (particularly

Baudelaire, whose Artificial Paradises was instrumental in Benjaminstaking up hashish), may have certain advantages here, though as a

translation it is perhaps too lyrical, just as intoxication is too clinical

and trance too mystical. In addition to its philosophical usage, con-

cerned with a complex existential state, the term Rausch is used in the

drug protocols to refer to the particular drug experience in question,

the drug trip. Benjamin makes fine distinctions in regard to the char-

acter of the drug high, often complaining of what seemed to him a

weak dose.

Thanks are due Maria Ascher for her incisive editing of the present

volume. In addition, the translator would like to acknowledge the

help received from consulting an earlier translation ofber Haschisch

by Scott J. Thompson, who performed an important service in first

presenting this eccentric and fascinating text to an English-language

audience.

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Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts

The following abbreviations are used for works by Walter Benjamin:

GS Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., suppl., ed. Rolf Tiedemann,

Hermann Schweppenhuser, et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,19721989)

GB Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri

Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 19952000)

SW Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19962003)

AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1999)

CWB The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R.

Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1994)

Translations in this book are by Howard Eiland, unless otherwise in-

dicated. Protocols by Benjamins colleagues are printed in italics.

xiii


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Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature

m a r cu s b o o n

Always the same worldyet one has patience.

Walter Benjamin,

On Hashish, Protocol 12

i f e v e r t h e re was someone who took drugs because of reading

books about them, then that person was Walter Benjamin. As early

as 1919, he noted propos of Baudelaires key text on hashish,

Artificial Paradises, which he had just finished reading, that it will

be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book.1 Inhis notes on his first experiment with hashish in 1927, he claimed a

feeling of understanding Poe much better now. Indeed, despite the

scientific trappings of the protocols in this book, Benjamins orien-

tation in examining hashish was similar to that found in his explora-

tion of the Parisian arcades, which were to form the basis for a new

kind of archeology/history of the nineteenth century. While Louis

Armstrong and his sidekick Mezz Mezzrow were making pot-smok-

1

1. Walter Benjamin, September 19, 1919, to Ernst Schoen, From the Letters, inthis volume.


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ing fashionable in New York City, and Commissioner of Narcotics

Harry Anslinger was beginning his congressional campaign against

the evils of smoking weed, Benjamin, ever the connoisseur of the re-

cently outmoded, lay in a hotel bed in Marseilles eating hashish in

the style of the great littrateurs of the nineteenth century.

The word hashish has at least two different meanings: histori-

cally, it has been a general term for psychotropic preparations made

from the cannabis plant (Alice B. Toklas hashish fudge was in fact

made with pulverized cannabis leaves); more commonly today, it re-fers to the resin, which is removed from the buds (flowers and sur-

rounding leaves) of the plant and pressed into beige, brown, or black

cakes.2 Knowledge of the psychotropic effects of cannabis probably

dates back to the Neolithic, while literary references to the drug

started with a variety of mystical and polemical poems published in

North Africa and the Middle East in medieval times, when debates

raged as to whether or not cannabis was prohibited to Muslims.3 Al-

though extracts of the cannabis plant may have been part of folk

remedies in Europe for centuries, hashish became well known in Eu-

rope only in the nineteenth century, as part of the orientalism that

was fashionable at the time. It was said that Napoleons armies had

brought hashish to Europe when they returned from the Egyptian

2

Marcus Boon

2. See Paul Bowles, Kif: Prologue and Compendium of Terms, in George An-drews and Simon Vinkenoog, eds., The Book of Grass (New York: Grove, 1967),108114.

3. On neolithic cannabis use, see Paul Devereux, The Long Trip: A Prehistory ofPsychedelia (New York: Penguin, 1997), 3944; and Richard Rudgley, EssentialSubstances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society (New York: Kodansha,1994), 2831. On medieval Islamic cannabis use, see Franz Rosenthal, The Herb:Hashish versus Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1971); and Hakim Bey, The BhangNama, in Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, eds., Orgies of the Hemp Eaters (New

York: Autonomedia, 2004).


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campaigns of 17981801. In 1809 the great French orientalist Sylvestre

de Sacy presented a memorandum in Paris concerning the use of

hashish by the medieval Assassins, a radical Ismaeli group who lived

on what is now the Turkish-Iranian border.4 Although the etymol-

ogy that links hashish to assassin is probably false, this link stirred

the imaginations of Parisian bohemia, eventually leading to the for-

mation of the Club des Haschischins in Paris in 1845, a salon in an

old hotel on the Ile Saint-Louis at which a number of key Parisian

writers and artists, including Baudelaire, Balzac, Gautier, Delacroix,Daumier, and others, ate hashish in the form of a paste, mixed with

almonds, and washed down with a little soup and the sounds of a

string quartet. The club was immortalized in Gautiers charmingly

gothic short story Le Club des Hachischins (the spellings of the

word hashish and its cognates have been as diverse as the effects

claimed for the drug). The cascade of hallucinations found in this

story, and in other works such as the extravagant Hashish Eater(1857),

by the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, may seem improbable to

contemporary readers who have inhaled. It was not only the literary

conventions of the gothic that were responsible for this excess; the

doses of hashish ingested by nineteenth-century writers also appear

to have been potent enough for the drug to function more like a hal-

lucinogen than an after-dinner joint.

Baudelaire wrote two texts concerning hashish, each of which is

caustic, verging on hostile. In an 1851 essay, he compared hashish

unfavorably to the wine of the people, which he linked to revolu-

3


4. The text was published in 1818 as Mmoire sur la dynastie des Assassins etsur ltymologie de leur nom, Mmoires de lInstitut Royal de France, in Acadmiedes Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 4 (1818), 184.


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tionary consciousness.5 In 1860 he devoted half of his bookArtificial

Paradises to a discussion of hashishthe other half being devoted to

a loose translation of Thomas De Quinceys Confessions of an English

Opium Eater, generally considered the first literary discussion of drugs,

and for Baudelaire the last word on the subject. Although Baudelaire

pronounced hashish veritably satanic, it s hard to know how to take

this comment, coming from the author of the Litanies of Satan. If

Baudelaire linked hashish to evil, then this evil might be seen as a

passage out of the horrors and torpors of nineteenth-century bour-geois Europe. If this passage proved to be a dead end, and if

Baudelaire dutifully pointed out that fact, it did not stop generations

of French and other European youthDecadents, Symbolists, and

othersfrom discovering and rediscovering the drug, as a potential

catalyst for triggering Baudelairean visions.6 And Benjamin too, from

the variety of references found in The Arcades Project, clearly thought

that hashish provided a key to understanding Baudelaire, particularly

his early insight into the commodity form as a drug-like hallucination.

The situation surrounding drugs was changing rapidly during the

period in which Benjamin was writing. Around the time of World

War I, the first national and international conventions regulating

drug use were ratified, and the more or less free circulation of sub-

stances, which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, was re-

placed by an increasingly complex system of regulation which has

continued to this day. At first, these regulations were aimed princi-

4

Marcus Boon

5. Du vin et du hachish, in Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1 (Paris:Gallimard, 1975), 397.6. Some of the key nineteenth-century texts on hashish have been collected inAndrew C. Kimmens, ed., Tales of Hashish: A Literary Look at the Hashish Expe-rience(New York: Morrow, 1977); and in Bey and Zug, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters.


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pally at opium-related substances (opium, morphine and heroin), but

in Germany Indian hemp was one of the substances whose use

was regulated by the drug law passed on December 10, 1929.7 Re-

ferring to his hashish experiment of April 18, 1931, Benjamin says that

Merck and Company may be depended upon (Protocol 9), so we

can assume that he had access to research-grade pharmaceuticals

the German drug company also being a producer of mescaline.

Legal or not, drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of cel-

ebration in Benjamins intellectual milieu. Despite Benjamins desire towrite a book about these substances,he was apparently concerned enough

about his reputation to urge his friend and correspondent Gerhard

Scholem to be discrete about his book plans.8The use of the word

crock to signify opium in Benjamins notes on the experiments he

conducted with Jean Selz on Ibiza in 1933 also suggests a concern

with discretion. At the same time, Benjamins level of concern cant

have been that great, since he did publish a first-person account of

his hashish experience in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1932. In fact,

Benjamins candor stands in marked contrast to that of fellow Ger-

man drug flneur Ernst Jnger, who prudently waited until 1970 to pub-

lish his own thoughts on a lifetime of drug experimentation, by which

point the climate for such publications was considerably altered.

After World War I, the situation surrounding drugs also changed

in literary terms. Although a number of the Surrealists used drugs,

contrary to popular belief Andr Breton was staunchly against drugs

and the exploration of consciousness using chemicalsand he ex-

pelled from the group any members who took drugs. Those writers

5


7. Werner Pieper, ed., Nazis on Speed: Drogen im Dritten Reich, vol. 2, 475(Lhrbach: Pieper and The Grne Kraft, n.d. [2002]).8. Letter to Gershom Scholem, July 26, 1932, From the Letters, in this volume.


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who were interested in drug use in the interwar periodAntonin

Artaud, Polish modernist Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Ren Daumal,

Benjaminwere an untimely group, their writings largely ignored or

unpublished until they were discovered by the Beats and the 1960s

radical movements. In a sense, Benjamins project for a left-wing pol-

itics of intoxication (a project which links him to figures such as

Bataille and the French College of Sociology writers) failed, and af-

ter World War II drugs became associated with libertarian or right-

wing writers: with Jnger, William Burroughs, R. Gordon Wasson,and Aldous Huxley, or with other untimely fellow travelers, such as

Henri Michaux. To this day, any rapprochement between Marxism

and intoxication, beyond the time-honored proletarian pleasures of

alcohol, is rare.9 Philosopher Ernst Bloch, who collaborated on

Benjamins second drug protocol, claimed that he experienced no ef-

fects when he took hashish.10

Since Ive linked Benjamin so firmly to literature, I should point

6

Marcus Boon

9. Scott J. Thompson argues that this aspect of Benjamins own work has beenneglected; see Thompson, From Rausch to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin on

Hashish, in Pieper, Nazis on Speed, vol. 2, 5969). For Marxist texts that discussintoxication, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), a study of yage healers in the Co-lombian Putumayo; Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, whose comments on1960s youth movements are cited in Thompson, From Rausch to Rebellion,6465; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World(Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 1984), which discusses carnival; and Georges Bataille, LIvresse destavernes et la religion, Critique, 25 (1948): 531539. Note also the dismissal ofpsychedelics in the proto-Situationist journal Potlatch: 19541957(Paris: EditionsAllia, 1996), 127128.10. See Ernst Bloch, Briefe, 19031975, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 310. Inhis magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffnung, however, Bloch devotes several para-graphs to the power of hashish to produce a waking dream state. See The Prin-ciple of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 8990.


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out that what he really intended to do with the notes he collected is

highly unclear; and if we apply the term literature to this jumble of

apparently scientific drug protocols, psychological fragments, philo-

sophical observations, essays, short stories, and other generic oddi-

ties, this is in part because literature is where we place that which

does not fit within the boundaries of traditional disciplines. The

words drugs and literature in their modern senses emerge around

the same time (circa 1800, with the Romantics). Both are concerned with

the full manifestation of the power of the human imagination, withconsciousness in its expanded sense, at a time of increasingly relent-

less utilitarianism. And both become conceptual garbage dumps where

the apparently dangerous excesses of the imagination are shunted for

disposalplaces filled with an allure that is all the more intense be-

cause of the sense of the forbidden, of transgression, with which they

are invested. What gets disposed of in these sites is not always treated

with great discrimination. Although hashish, opium, and mescaline

differ in their effects, this montage of texts and observations tends to

blur the boundaries between these drugsas do Benjamins readily

apparent personality, and his gorgeous writing style.

Benjamin was certainly not the first writer to plan a great philo-

sophical tome under the influence of drugsboth De Quincey and

Coleridge had plans which came to nothingbut On Hashish exists

only as a series of fragments. It is hard not to link this apprehen-

sion of a profound unity or workand the jumble of unfinished

fragments that is left in its wakewith intoxication itself, and with

the failure of drug-induced insights and experiences to sustain them-

selves in coherent form when the intoxication is over. Perhaps

Benjamin preferred it that way. The fact that it was the right-wing

German writer Ernst Jnger who, through sheer determination,

7



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Editorial Note

tillman rexroth

Tillman Rexroths Editorische Notiz appears at the end of his edition of

ber Haschisch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 147149. It is this vol-

ume that Rexroth refers to below.

t h i s v o l um e c o n ta i n s Benjamins writings on drug intoxica-

tion, together with protocols (records) of drug experiments in which

Benjamin took part. Only two of the texts were published by

Benjamin himself. The short story MyslowitzBraunschweig

Marseille [MysloviceBraunschweigMarseilles] appeared in the

journal Uhu in November 1930; the personal account Haschisch in

Marseille [Hashish in Marseilles]which, although it repeats ver-

batim certain passages of the short story, is actually closer to the orig-

inal drug protocol that forms the basis of both textswas published

December 4, 1932, in the Frankfurter Zeitungand reprinted in 1961 in

the volume of selected writings entitled Illuminationen. These two

previously published pieces deserve a place in a volume that brings

together all available texts documenting Benjamins engagement with

intoxicating drugs. A French translation of Haschisch in Marseille,

which appeared in the Cahiers du Sud in January 1935 with the title

Hachich Marseille, was excluded, however, because this transla-

13


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tion was not prepared by Benjamin. None of the other texts in this

volume have been published before. The manuscripts and typescripts

of the records written by Benjamin and by the other authors are

housed in the Theodor W. Adorno Benjamin-Archiv in Frankfurt

am Main.

Although Benjamin planned to write a book about hashish, the

fragmentary Crocknotizen [Crock Notes] is the only one of the

transmitted texts in which theoretical reflection outweighs descrip-

tive notation. To be sure, the Crocknotizen cannot be regarded as ageneral rsum of Benjamins drug experiments; rather, they refer in

all likelihood to a particular experiment that took place at the home

of Jean Selz on Ibiza in 1932.1 It is this experiment, presumably, that

is being described in the following passage from a letter written by

Benjamin to Gretel Adorno:

At the start of the evening, I was feeling very sad. But I was con-

scious of that rare state in which the inner and the outer worries

balance each other very precisely, giving rise to what is perhaps the

only mood in which one really finds solace. We took this as practi-

cally a sign, and after making all the ingenious little arrangements

that free one from having to stir during the night, we set to work

around two oclock. It was not the first time in terms of chronol-

ogythough in terms of success, it was. The role of assistant,

which requires great care, was divided between us, in such a way

that each of us was at the same time server and beneficiary of the

service, and the conversation was interwoven with the acts of as-

14

Tillman Rexroth

1. The date was actually 1933. See Jean Selz, An Experiment by WalterBenjamin, included in this volume. [H.E.]


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sistance in the same way that the threads which color the sky in a

Gobelin tapestry are interwoven with the battle represented in the

foreground.

What this conversation was headed toward, what it sometimes

verged on, is something I can scarcely convey to you. But if the

notes which Ill soon draft on the subject of these hours attain the

requisite degree of precision, so as to be assembled with others in a

dossier which you know about, then the day may come when I will

have the pleasure of reading one or another of these things to you.Today Ive obtained significant results in my study of curtains

for a curtain separated us from the balcony that looked out on the

city and the sea.2

The protocols are arranged chronologically. Texts by Benjamin

thus appear alongside accounts written by Ernst Bloch, Ernst Jol,

and Fritz Frnkel. The authors of some of the protocols could not be

determined with certainty.

All of the drug records are reproduced in their entirety. Readers

should make allowance for overlapping of the texts, such as occurs

with the three versions of the hashish experiment in Marseilles, or

with Blochs protocol of the second hashish impression and

Benjamins supplementary transcript of this protocol. Readers should

likewise note that this volume omits a manuscript which is in the

possession of Gershom Scholem and which is the basis of the type-

15

Editorial Note

2. This letter, written from Ibiza on or around May 26, 1933, is printed in fulland annotated in GB4, 216220. Just prior to the passage quoted by Rexroth,Benjamin writes: Hardly any clouds [of opium smoke] rise to the ceiling, sodeeply do I understand how to draw them out of the long bamboo tube into myinsides (217). [H.E.]


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script printed here with the title Saturday, September 29, [1928];

Marseilles, and two handwritten notes which Benjamin incorpo-

rated into MyslowitzBraunschweigMarseille and into the pro-

tocol of May 11, 1928. Undated notes by Benjamin that do not belong

with any of the complete protocols have been printed to the extent

they can be deciphered.

The express wish of one of the participants in the experiments in-

duced the editor, in one case, to alter some proper names.3The pecu-

liarities of the protocolswhich for the most part comprise noteswritten in a state of intoxication or dictated for transcription by type-

writer and in part left uncorrectedhave been largely preserved.

16

Tillman Rexroth

3. In question are the names of Gustav Glck and Erich Unger in Hashish inMarseilles. See Protocol 4, note 12. [H.E.]


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Protocols of Drug Experiments

1. December 18, 1927 19

2. January 15, 1928 23

3. May 11, 1928 36

4. September 29, 1928 47

5. March 1930 57

6. June 78, 1930 62

7. March 7, 1931 65

8. April 12, 1931 71

9. April 18, 1931 73

10. Crock Notes (ca. June 1933) 81

11. May 22, 1934 86

12. Undated Notes 98


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chapter 1

Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish

Written December 18, [1927], at 3:30 a.m.

1. Spirits hover (vignette style) over my right shoulder. Cold-

ness in that shoulder. In connection with this: I have the

feeling there are four others in the room besides me. (By-

passing the necessity of including myself in the count.)

2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote with the explanation

or rather suggestion: show someone the mask (the mask of

ones own face, that is, the displayers face).1

3. Convoluted utterance on an ether mask, which (it goes with-

out saying) would also have mouth, nose, and so on.

4. The two coordinates in the apartment: cellarfloor / the

horizontal. Great horizontal extension of the apartment.

Suite of rooms, from which music is coming. But perhaps

also dread of the corridor.

5. Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxi-

ety complexes. The sphere of character opens up. All those

present take on hues of the comic. At the same time, one

steeps oneself in their aura.

6. The comic is elicited not just from faces but from incidents.

One seeks occasions for laughter. And perhaps it is only for

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this reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as

arranged, as experimentso that one can laugh about it.

7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: at one point I maintain that,

in answering a question a little earlier, I had used the expres-

sion for a long time purely as a result (so to speak) of my

perception of a long time in the sounding of the words of the

question and answer. I experience this as poetic evidence.

8. Connection; distinction. In smiling, one feels oneself grow-

ing small wings. Smiling and fluttering are related. You feeldistinguished because, among other things, it seems to you

that fundamentally you enter into nothing too deeply: that,

no matter how deeply you penetrate, you are always moving

on the threshold. A sort of toe dance of reason.

9. One is very much struck by how long ones sentences are.

This, too, connected with horizontal extension and (proba-

bly) with laughter. The arcade is also a phenomenon of long

horizontal extension, perhaps combined with vistas receding

into distant, fleeting, tiny perspectives. The element of the

diminutive would serve to link the idea of the arcade to

laughter. (Compare the Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing

power of reflection.)2

10. There arises, quite fleetingly, in a moment of introversion,

something like an inclination [words illegible] to stylize one-

self, to stylize ones body.

11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture.

Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.

12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The gates to

a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening. Only, I dont

wish to enter.

20

Protocols of Drug Experiments

benjamin on hachich

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