The German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin is not remembered as a comedian. Indeed, if the first thing you ever read by the great thinker was "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," chock full of lines like "the representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a productive use of the human being's self-alienation," you might be forgiven for concluding that Benjamin's genius was, shall we say, a little stuffy.
Well, rest easy, because a little book we've published called On Hashish proves that this is not the case. The book, which consists of twelve "protocols," or drug experiments, reveals an altogether different side of Benjamin. Gone are the meditations on "the dialectical structure of film" and the possibility of a "proletarian children's theater." In On Hashish, such lofty reveries find themselves replaced by sentences like the following:
"Oven turns into cat."
"I'd like to be transformed into a mouse mountain." (followed by "repeated short bursts of laughter")
"Eating belongs to another world."
"The subject finds himself inexplicably amused by the dullest of political slogans."
Hmmm, Walter Benjamin as common stoner--try and wrap your head around that one. In truth, though, Benjamin was anything but average. His accounts of his drug experiences radiate pearls of wisdom in much the same way as his philosophical writings. Indeed, Benjamin refused to approach hashish from the standpoint of the recreational user. He ingested the drug (massive amounts of it, by the way) in search of what he called "profane illumination," a broadening of everyday experience, even when that "experience" consisted of stumbling around Marseilles wolfing down as many servings of oysters and pate as he could get his hands on (see the hilarious essay entitled "Hashish in Marseilles").
On Hashish is a book that reveals Benjamin to be a true lover of life. As Robert Fulford put it in the National Post: "Everything Benjamin wrote, even when the subject is less than pleasant, exudes an almost euphoric spirit. It was as if he wrote as a form of worship, out of gratitude for the chance to live and discover." The book really does read like that--it's a pleasure to read Benjamin's words and feel, however vicariously, the effects of his voracious intellect and genuine zeal for experience.
Check out the May 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine for an excerpt and reviews, or check reviews in the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. A few months ago, Benjamin even made Gawker.com (something we're guessing he would have found amusing)! Or travel to the HUP website for a different excerpt, more reviews, and links to other Benjamin books (including The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, out this November).
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