The NS guide to the Walter Benjamin's "On Hashish"
It was recently announced that the government plans to prosecute as dealers those caught with as few as five grams of cannabis - enough for about ten joints. These people could face up to 14 years in jail. Faced with such a stiff penalty, users might think it wise to renounce the weed altogether, in which case the best they can do is intoxicate themselves vicariously by immersing themselves in some of the (not terribly copious, for obvious reasons) literature about drugs.
Right on cue comes Walter Benjamin's On Hashish (Harvard), a collection of writings about the series of "experiments" that the philosopher and some of his intellectual chums carried out in Berlin, Marseilles and Ibiza between 1927 and 1934.
Benjamin's method was to imbibe a scary amount of cannabis (usually by ingesting it: the most intoxicating method) and then record the experience in the form of jottings, which he sometimes wrote up into more coherent prose the following day. Not surprisingly, these "protocols", as Benjamin called them (thus conferring a dubious aura of scientific exactitude upon the enterprise), make for uneven reading. Many are plain incomprehensible: it is hard to know, for instance, the meaning of the "colportage phenomenon of space" (he refers to this a lot).
Yet others are surprisingly lucid and, for those familiar with altered states of consciousness, instantly recognisable. "The sphere of 'character' opens up. All those present take on hues of the comic." (Read: "I'm starting to get the giggles.") "Hunger as an oblique axis cutting through the system of the trance." ("Now I've got the munchies.") Or, most alarmingly: "On my return home, when the chain on the bathroom door proved hard to fasten, the suspicion: an experiment is being set up." ("Oh my god, I'm feeling seriously paranoid. Please, someone, get me out of here!")
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