——毒品教给本雅明什么？
Adam Kirsch 著
1927年12月18日，凌晨三点半，沃尔特·本雅明开始写一个备忘录，名字叫做《我对大麻初感的主要特征》（Main
Features of My First Impression of Hashish）。他认为有必要记录的第一个事实，并非吸食开始的时间，而是写作开始的时间。这是典型的本雅明风格。较之作为一种毒品，大麻（hashish）对他的重要性，更在于它是一个阐释的对象——就像他读过的书和漫步过的路——就像生活本身。
一个作家，如果拥有本雅明的兴趣和忠诚，他与大麻的邂逅就不可避免。令人惊讶的是本雅明直到三十五岁才第一次尝试大麻。而早在1919年，他就已经为波德莱尔的《人工天堂》（Artificial
Paradise）着迷了。在那本书里，诗人对大麻的警告极具诱惑性，仿佛恳切邀请一般：“你知道，大麻总能唤起光的华丽建筑，壮丽辉煌的景象，液体黄金的瀑布。”本雅明视波德莱尔为十九世纪的重要作家之一，他热爱书中“孩童般的无辜和纯洁”，但为书中缺少哲学的严格性而感到遗憾。他指出：“有必要独立重复此种尝试。”初次大麻幻觉的记录显示，本雅明有意避开了任何形式的狂喜。“通向一个奇异世界的门，仿佛正在开启，”他写道。“只是，我不希望进去。”本雅明的朋友让·塞尔兹（Jean
Selcz）曾与本雅明一起抽过几次鸦片，据他回忆，“本雅明是个拒斥鸦片初始诱惑的吸食者。他不想过于轻易地屈服，因为他害怕减弱他的观察力。”
在接下来的七年里，本雅明至少九次参与吸毒活动。或者自己吸，或者观察别人。但他对毒品始终保持警惕和实验的态度。独处的时候，他很少吸，他也从没有自己的毒品来源。他完全靠医生朋友获取大麻、鸦片；并且只要过一次迷幻药（mescaline）。这几次活动，记录在《草案》（Protocols）中，本雅明准备以此为原料，就吸毒的哲学心理学含义写一本大部头著作。在给格尔斯霍姆·肖勒姆（Gershom
Scholem），这位自己二十三岁起最好的朋友的一封信里，四十岁的本雅明，列举了四本他没有写的书。他把它们看作“大规模的失败”——他事业已成为“废墟或灾难”的证据——而最后的，就是那本“真正杰出的关于大麻的著作”。
将近四分之三个世纪之后，本雅明《论大麻》（On Hashish）一书的英文版，终于面世了。一起出版的，还有另一本经过长期酝酿的作品，《1900年前后柏林的童年》（Berlin
Childhood Around 1900）（哈佛出版社，每本14.95美元）。不过，《论大麻》并非本雅明脑海里那本“真正杰出的著作”；它是一本杂记，收辑了本雅明毒品实验的草案，两篇发表过的毒品体验描写，以及少数从本雅明其它作品中精选出来的、关于毒品的论述。它仅能初步暗示，毒品在本雅明思想形成过程中，起到真正重要的作用。
但正因为如此，《论大麻》和一篇较为传统的毒品论文的关系，就相当于本雅明的文论散文，之于传统批评。“你几乎无法察觉你是在读评论文章，”当本雅明的第一个英文选本《启迪》（Illuminations）在1968年面世时，弗兰克·科默德说。“它要求的反应，是那种我们惯常对艺术作品的反应。”本雅明的作品仿佛沉没的大陆，《启迪》只显露了它的几个尖峰。但这已足够建立起本雅明在现代主义思想史中的重要地位。本雅明把他涉及到的每一个流派都当作实验室，对语言、哲学和艺术进行终生的研究。在这些主题上，他的观点那么原创，含义又那么根本，在他逝世后六十五年多的今天，仍保持深刻，富于挑战性。
本雅明的成年时代，以及他取得的成就，处于在1914年到1940年之间。这是现代欧洲史最黑暗的年代。如果说，从来没有人写过本雅明那样的批评，那是因为没有别的批评家，如此剧烈地体会到这时代的孤独感。1892年，本雅明生于柏林一个显赫的犹太家庭。他对未来的期望，成形于1914年之前的太平年代。在《柏林纪事》（A
Berlin Chronicle），一组构成《1900年前后柏林的童年》之核心的报刊文章里，他回忆起满溢于公寓里家具的，那种布尔乔亚式的安全感：
统治这里的是这样一类事物，不管它如何顺从于潮流的变幻无常，大体上它仍坚信自己，坚信自己的永恒性。因此它不考虑磨损、继承或变化，永远与它的末日保持相同地远又相同地近，仿佛它的末日，就是万物的末日一般。
在这样的家中，贫困是不可想象的：“穷人？对于他这一代的富家子弟，穷人生活在遥远的过去。”
本雅明的父亲是一个成功的古董商。在潮流的影响下，本雅明希望抛弃父亲的行当，去从事声望较高的学者职业。当一战开始时，他已完全致力于学术研究，而且，作为一个反战者，他对施计逃过兵役并无不安。本雅明这几年生活的最好资料，格尔斯霍姆·肖勒姆感人而冷静的回忆录《沃尔特·本雅明：一个友谊的故事》（Walter
Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship），记录了他们两个如何在征兵局体检的前夜，整夜不眠。“本雅明喝了大量的黑咖啡，许多年轻人在征兵体检前都这样做。”这个模拟心脏衰弱的伎俩成功了，本雅明得以在伯尔尼大学攻读他的博士学位，在瑞士度过剩下的战争时光。
肖勒姆和本雅明共有学术的雄心和反战的信念，学生时代的友谊为他们终生的学术论辩打下了基础，而这些论辩，多在信件里发生。从一开始，他们之间最关键的话题就是犹太教，以及在德国成为一个犹太知识分子的可能性。肖勒姆是个激烈的犹太复国主义者，他因此被他宗教同化了的家庭逐出家门。对于肖勒姆，犹太神秘主义的历史逐渐代替数学和哲学，成为他研究的中心。而对本雅明，较之于一种生活方式，犹太教始终更是一种想象中的可能性。他从未掌握犹太教的仪式和经文。正如他向肖勒姆承认的，“除了你之外，我绝不知道现存犹太教的任何其它形式。”
这对朋友对犹太身份的不同态度，很大程度上决定了他们接下来的事业。他俩为德国大学生活接受训练，却都没有进入德国大学供职。1923年，肖勒姆把他的名字从德文的格哈德（Gerhard）改成了希伯来文的格尔斯霍姆（Gershom），并移民到了没有大学的巴勒斯坦；他决定当一名教师养活自己。仿佛命中注定一般，稍后耶路撒冷希伯莱大学建立起来时，他被任命第一批教授之一。到了1982年，他已成为现代犹太教神秘主义最伟大的学者。本雅明留在了家庭附近，但他最终远远偏离了早期的学术道路。1919年拿到博士学位之后，他在法兰克福大学注册，写作他的Habilitationsschrift，也就是在德国大学教书所必需的第二篇论文。不过，当他为最终的论文《德国悲剧的起源》（The
Origin of German Tragic Drama）进行研究时，他已怀疑这篇文章永远不会被守旧的教授批准通过。较之历史性的论述，这篇论文更像是对寓言之本性的哲学冥想。他向肖勒姆夸口说，这是“绝对的放肆”。然而比论文被拒更坏的可能，则是论文得到通过。1925年2月，当本雅明准备提交论文的时候，他承认，“我害怕几乎所有从正面决定产生出来的事情：我最害怕法兰克福，然后是讲课，学生，等等等等。”
本雅明不用担心。虽说论文包含了他关于语言和文学的，一些最根本的见解，他的考官们仍然拒绝了文章。他们承认一页都看不懂。接着，在20年代中期，他的事业拐了一个大弯。他的父母逐渐不愿意，或者是没有能力，再供养他。这时，他开始以自由文学记者的身份过活，为报纸杂志的文化栏目写作。
作为学术哲学家的本雅明之死，意味着作为文化批评家的本雅明的诞生。哈佛大学里程碑式的四卷版《选集》（Selected
Wrtings）（新出的两本书中，绝大多数内容都从此而来）使读者得以了解本雅明研究方向的转变，以及他投身文学市场后，与日俱增的创作力。他从1913年至1926年的所有文字，都辑在第一卷里，里面主要是关于抽象论题的，未曾发表的散文。他的第一篇主要文论，关于歌德小说《亲和力》（Elective
Affinities）的长文，直到1925年才得以发表。但是从20年代中期起，他变得越来越多产。哈佛版的第二卷包括了从1927到1934的七年，而他的最后6年，则需要整整两卷。
本雅明的大部分早期作品都贴上了他间接智慧（oblique
intelligence）的标签，但那只不过是新闻作品的小小变形：游记、书评、一篇关于1928年柏林食品展览会的文章。这种作品给了本雅明不稳定的生活，却也帮助了他，让他在严苛的德国唯心哲学学院形成的、极端致密的风格，适合于一种更吸引人的文学手段。但即使如此，他的散文依然富于挑战性。有一次，一个朋友告诉他：“在伟大的作品中，那些表达特别让人震撼、特别有意义的句子和总句子的比例，大约是一比三十——在（你的）情况里它更像是一比二。”（“这些都对，”本雅明承认。）
本雅明最有名的文论，是那些发表在《启迪》上的，对普鲁斯特、波德莱尔和卡夫卡的考察。我们可在那些文论中看到他迂回的写法。这其中极少包括我们通常在评论中期待的：生平背景、故事梗概和人物介绍、历史-文学的比较。本雅明代之以令人惊讶的隐喻和象征，谜语式地呈现他的主题。他关于普鲁斯特（本雅明将他的作品译成德文）的散文，叫做《普鲁斯特的形象》（The
Image of Proust）。文章含蓄地将小说家的方法和批评家的方法相比较。他将普鲁斯特塑造为一个收藏者，收藏那些充满感情的形象，和瞬息即逝的片段。正是这些形象和片段，打开了通往被掩埋生命的道路。“当巴尔贝克（Balbec）的夏日——苍老的、无法回忆的、干瘪的——在弗朗索瓦丝（Fran·oise）的手下，自蕾丝窗帘浮现，形象将它自己，从普鲁斯特句子的结构中分离出来，”本雅明写道。在文章的结尾，普鲁斯特躺在床上，哮喘引起的力竭转变成英雄式的行为。本雅明以此形象作结，用普鲁斯特的方式作出回应：
米开朗琪罗式的脚手架，第二次搭建起来。在那上面，艺术家仰着头在西斯廷教堂的屋顶上绘制创世的图景：而马塞尔·普鲁斯特在他的病床上，用他的手稿，向他创造的微观世界献祭，他将那无数写满字的手稿举在空中。
本雅明的文论过于独特，过于强硬，这使他无法赢得大批读者。但他的敬慕者包括了在世的部分最有名的德语作家，其中有雨果·冯·霍夫曼斯塔尔和贝尔托德·布莱希特。到1930年，本雅明已有足够的信心宣布自己的目标：“成为最重要的德语文学批评家”。
然而本雅明最具影响力的身份，不是文学批评家，而是开拓性的文化批评家。他是认为所有文化产物都值得分析的第一批作家之一。他最著名的散文，《机械复制时代的艺术作品》（The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction），以此为指导原理。而该文，如今已成为艺术史、电影研究，以及相关领域的权威文献。在文中本雅明论述，传统的绘画或雕塑，具有某种他称为“韵味”（Aura）的东西。它源自对作品绝对的独特性的认可。这就是为什么每天成百上千人排起长队，匆匆地、模糊地看上《蒙娜丽莎》一眼：不仅仅是为了看，更是为了置身于这近乎神圣的所在。本雅明意识到，在技术时代，这独特性被复制品现成的实用性冲淡，我们观看一件艺术品可以永远不看原作。此外，在二十世纪标志性的艺术形式，摄影和电影中，根本不存在“原作”这一概念。
令人惊讶的是，本雅明欢迎无韵味艺术这一主张。他解释说，韵味是种贵族式的故弄玄虚，而它的消失，应该预兆一种新的、更民主的艺术：“电影的社会意义，即使在——而且尤其在——它最积极的形式里，也不可能脱离其破坏、毁灭性的一面：对文化遗产中传统价值的清算。”这种语调，带着对“破坏”和“清算”的热情，来自本雅明之口，听来显然奇怪。读者会问，这普鲁斯特和卡夫卡的伟大拥护者，最后怎会贬低起独特性和原创性来？一个将《追忆逝水年华》和西斯廷教堂拱顶作比的人，怎么也会认为一件艺术作品中的“潜心沉思”，是“反社会行为的温床”？
答案，就在本雅明对马克思主义极端笨拙的拥护中。像当时许多其他知识分子一样，他开始相信，只有共产主义才能将欧洲从战争、萧条和法西斯主义中拯救出来。1926年，他访问苏联，执意相信共产主义会向作家，提供比资本主义更好的条件。本雅明的个人境况不过是增强了这一判断。文学记者从来不是一个赚钱的行当，而在魏玛德国，这更是英雄式的无用功。到1931年，本雅明坦白“物质环境……让我的生活——没有财产、没有稳定收入——变成一个悖论，考虑到这一点，即使我自己，有时也会因惊讶，而神志不清。”而希特勒掌权后，本雅明失去了他仅剩的一点生活来源。 1933年3月，他自德国逃往法国，此后再也没有回来。在剩下的日子里，他一直生活在贫困的边缘。从法兰克福基地被流放的社会研究院，提供给他一份津贴，帮助他勉强支持下去。“我的共产主义，”本雅明说，“是对事实的一个激烈、而非贫瘠的表达。事实是，当代的知识产业无法为我的思想提供空间，一如当代的经济无法容纳我的生活。”
本雅明的马克思主义转变，受到了布莱希特等朋友的欢迎。布莱希特甚至为他没有走得更远而感到遗憾。另一方面，肖勒姆从巴勒斯坦的来信提出了一连串的批评。他认为这不过是个时髦的伪装：“在你真实的，和你所宣称的思想方法之间，有着令人不安的疏远和分离。”而本雅明拒绝承认他对共产主义的独特理解已极大偏离了党派正统，这更是让肖勒姆火冒三丈。“倘若你想在共产党内发表你的作品，我完全确知它们身上会发生什么，而这让人十分沮丧，”肖勒姆写道。
本雅明从未加入过共产党，虽然他为此烦恼过。这一如他不断推迟他所宣称的，学习希伯来语，并移居巴勒斯坦的计划。但是，他对马克思主义原理有限而秘密的忠诚，显著地影响了他的作品——这些影响倾向于证实肖勒姆的悲观论调。如果本雅明没有新发现的，对文化产品之物质条件的兴趣，那么他就不可能写出《艺术作品》一文。而他受虐狂般地坚持用他的作品为阶级斗争服务：这也解释了该文强迫性的战意和野蛮。
本雅明的马克思主义带来的，最重大的伤亡，是《拱廊街计划》（The
Arcade Project）。今天它被称做从未写出的最著名的书。它是本雅明最后岁月的白鲸，是一部他发现自己永远无法完成的，尺度和原创性惊人的巨著。本雅明口中的Passagenwerk（《拱廊街计划》），名字来源于passages，或者说，装饰波德莱尔时代的巴黎的拱廊。这是些专门留作购物和闲逛的，玻璃顶的公共场所。它们为巴黎流浪者天堂的美誉增色。匿名的色情、幻灯般的时尚、陈腐与魅力的合剂，在19世纪巴黎的拱廊里，本雅明相信自己找到了现代城市之脐。
《拱廊街计划》吸引本雅明，最主要是因为在他的时代，拱廊已因百货商店而绝迹。这给拱廊以魅力，那种本雅明在每件被废弃和淘汰的事物上发现的，在所有烙印着文明最深秘密的碎石上发现的魅力。“对于查阅成堆古老信件的人，”他写道，“一个撕破的信封上一张早就退出流通的邮票，经常比读十页书告诉我们更多的事情。”在一篇散文中他称呼“巴黎，19世纪的首都”。本雅明梦想的，正是以这种方式，用拱廊来书写巴黎隐秘的历史。一开始，他把他的拱廊散文设计成简短、饱含典故和文学性的——“一个童话剧”，1928年他这样说。“任何情况下，”他向肖勒姆保证，“这都是一个只需要几星期就能完成的计划。”
本雅明死后留下的手稿，于1999年，以《拱廊街计划》为题出版。是什么将1928年的散文，变成注脚、片断和引语的千页垃圾堆？每一种答案，都肯定会包括本雅明拖延的习惯；导致他难以持续研究的，30年代的混乱生活环境；以及他试图完成的作品之固有的、难以捉摸的性质。然而，使他无法完成计划的最重要的原因，是马克思主义。30年代末期，当他诚挚地回到马克思主义的怀抱，他决意以辩证唯物主义的语言，重建对19世纪的巴黎的分析。社会研究学院给他一笔补助，期望的，则是一个马克思主义文化批评的卓越典范。
但是当本雅明着手，将《拱廊街计划》改造成某种可发表的形式，当他寄给狄奥多·阿多诺（Theodore
Ardono）一篇题为《波德莱尔笔下第二帝国时期的巴黎》（The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire）的散文时，他收到的，将是震惊。虽然他热衷于使用马克思主义术语，但对于一个像阿多诺这样敏锐的理论家，这些术语的运用，还是显得太过笨拙。马克思主义像一场雾，在他的巴黎图景上停留下来。这非但没有让图景变得清晰，反而让本雅明变得滥调连篇。（比方说，他将波德莱尔关于醉酒的名诗《拾荒人的酒》（Tha
Ragpickers’ Wine），解释成对酒税的回应。）在一封毁灭性的信中，阿多诺说，通过使用“唯物主义的范畴，”本雅明已经“在一种预审查里否定了你自己最大胆和最富成果的想法。”阿多诺的判断回应了肖勒姆：本雅明的马克思主义词汇背叛了他真正的洞察力。
这来自本雅明仅存资助者之代表的否定，是可怕的一击。而否定到来的时刻让这一击变得更糟：1938年整整一个秋天，他都在工作，因为他认为战争随时可能爆发。“我是在与战争赛跑，”他告诉已在纽约生活的阿多诺，“除开一切窒人的恐惧，在收尾的那一天，我仍感到了成功……在世界末日之前（手稿是多么脆弱！）。”而现在，他被告知成功是虚假的，《拱廊街计划》不能以他计划的方式写成。即使本雅明活得足够长，他能否完成《计划》仍然值得怀疑。这件作品的智性和意识形态基础，已成为一片废墟。
无论如何，历史没有给他机会。尽管他的朋友试图说服他移民到英国或美国，1940年夏天，本雅明仍在巴黎。在柏林，他曾为了躲避不幸而离开，而不幸追上了他。秋天的法国在为长期牺牲作准备，而他的传奇，也即将终结。虽然准确细节有待商榷，但情况大致是这样的：本雅明跟随一队难民，试图于1940年9月26日穿过波港（Port
Bou）的法西边境。或许是出于对盖世太保的顺从，西班牙边防警卫并未给他们发放签证，并将他们遣回。在绝望和疲劳中，本雅明服用了过量的吗啡。第二天早上，警卫发了善心，让剩下的人群逃过边境。只有葬在波港墓地的本雅明，留下来成为一个警示性的牺牲者——去谴责一个，热心杀害它的犹太人、它的激进分子和它最优秀的头脑的欧洲。
在这个关于被迫害天才的寓言里，大麻，该摆在什么位置？想在《论大麻》中找到清晰答案的读者也许会感到失望。《论大麻》，就像小型的《拱廊街计划》，是占位符和废墟。占位符替代他永远无法完成的作品，废墟占据他待建纪念碑的场地。而且，它同样需要小心的阐释（interpretation）。这个说法是完全恰当的，因为本雅明相信“人类的所有知识，如可被证实，必须以阐释的形式出现，而别无他途。”
最常见的一种阐释，当然是阅读。我们太惯于把阅读和阐释联系起来：算命者“读”掌纹，占星师“读”星象。于是，阅读为许多种与书面文本无关的活动提供了一种隐喻。为本雅明作品定性的，智性的追求——有时看起来像是他对自己的挑战——是为了发现这世界，到底有多少，可以被如此“阅读”。在《拱廊街计划》中，他为短命之物列了一个清单——广告海报、橱窗陈列、服装潮流——他评论道，“不管谁读懂这些信号，他不仅能预知新潮艺术，而且能预知新的法律、战争和革命。”
本雅明似乎很早就怀疑，万物都携带着秘密的信息。《1900年前后柏林的童年》是一系列小短文，每一篇专写童年的一件事或一个地方：“电话”、“袜子”、“在斯特格利泽（Steglitzer）街和根廷纳（Genthiner）街的街角”。结果它变成了一个人物稀少的奇怪回忆录。在书里，本雅明的父母沉默无声，而朋友几乎完全缺席。本雅明告诉肖勒姆，这作品包含了“我能为我自己画的，最准确的肖像”。然而在这肖像画中，模特从未出现，他的位置被围绕他的事物所代替。其结果，不光是为了本雅明看上去像个孤独、谨慎的孩子——虽然毫无疑问他正是这样。更确切地说，如果本雅明沉溺在对孤独、困倦和疾病的回忆中，那是因为这些无所防备的状态，让他能与他周围的事物最亲近地交流。“院子里的每件事物，都变成了对我的征兆或暗示，”他在题为《凉亭》的一节中写道。“许多是嵌在高高拉起的，绿色卷帘百叶窗上小小争论的消息；而许多是黄昏时，隆隆降下的百叶窗的咯吱声里，我小心未启的，不祥的急件。”
本雅明一直希望将他的阅读能力，转到更为诱人和晦涩的符号上——占星术让他着迷——而他这些对想法自愿的沉迷，暗示了在他所有作品中心，形而上的、甚至神秘主义的启示。这暗示在他对语言的理解上尤其明显。在肖勒姆看来，这种与神秘主义的亲密关系是显然的。他将本雅明的作品描述为“一种经常令人困惑的，对形而上神学和唯物主义两种思维模式的并置。”但要现代读者接受这种关系，并不容易。在生前和死后很久，本雅明思想神学的一面一直隐藏着，部分是因为他选择隐藏这一面。他从未发表他影响巨大的1916年论文，《论一般语言和人的语言》（On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man）。该文明确地提出他对语言的神秘主义观点。他也从未发表后期的，显示该观点一直把握他想象力的文章。多亏了《选集》的出版，英语世界读者才可能抓住如下的关键事实：本雅明思想中“形而上-神学”的元素，比“唯物主义”的元素，更古老，更深刻。
本雅明的论文《论一般语言和人的语言》指出，“无论在有生命的或无生命的自然界，没有一件事或一样东西，不通过某种方式参与到语言中，因为交流思想内容，是每样事物的本性。”世上的所有事物——星星、脸庞、动物、风景——都有其意义，而本雅明相信，这意味着一个创世者的存在。“上帝，”他宣称，“使万物可通过名字得到了解。”当然，人类语言约定俗成，这一长久以来的论点仍然成立，但本雅明不会支持“词语是任意的”这一论断：“布尔乔亚式的观点认为，词语与对应物之间的关系是偶然的，这已不再可信。”他认为有一种神的语言，在事物内部说话，而每一种人类语言，其实都是对神语失败和歪曲的翻译：“这是将事物的语言，翻译成人类的语言。”
在这里，本雅明发展的，关于语言的图景，是移动的。这恰恰是因为它不能为逻辑所证明，因为它非常雄辩地表达了本雅明对世界之意义的渴望。而那意义，通常表现为纯粹的混乱。这渴望，缓慢而不确定地，将他引向大麻。在大麻引起的恍惚中，他希望能比日常生活更直接地理解事物的语言——去体验一个充满了意义的宇宙。
本雅明尝试毒品时，他已阅读、想往它们很多年。而当这一刻终于来到，它却让人失望，至少从哲学意义上是如此。这并不是说，本雅明没有体验并享受所有通常的效果。他感受到了甘美。“无边的亲切感。逃离了神经强迫性的焦虑心理，”在第一次尝试时他这样记录。他看到奇怪的幻像，例如“一条长长的画廊，没有人穿的盔甲。没有头，只有火焰在脖子的开口处跳动。”他甚至还得到点心：“某天深夜在我的房间里，我突然间无法平息那饥饿带来的痛苦，它压倒了我。看起来我应该去买一块巧克力。”
但是本雅明所说的，“在沉醉的状态中——向新事物、未被触碰过的事物伸出手的——伟大的希望、欲望、向往”，仍然难以捉摸。“在它们的帮助下，突然穿透那最隐蔽，总体上最难以接触的，表面之世界，”当药效过去，这样的感觉也就消失了。留下来的，只是记录在草稿中，含义难懂的注释和姿态。而那曾像是活泼的洞察力的，如今只有它可笑的尸体。在1931年4月18日的一次吸毒过程中，给本雅明药的医生弗里兹·弗兰克（Fritz
Fr·nkel）记录道，“手臂和食指高举在空中，没有支撑。举起手臂即是‘亚美尼亚王国的新生’。”在另一次恍惚中，本雅明为想出一个短语“Wellen
schwappen—Wappen schwellen”（“波浪飞溅—徽章膨胀”）而激动不已。他宣称，在波浪和徽章上的设计之间有一种深层的、结构性的联系。而这押韵的词语，抓住了通往该联系的线索。“这论点提供了一个学术潮流，”弗兰克记录道。“‘Quod
in imaginibus, est in lingua.。’”弗兰克也许知道这拉丁短语的意思——“在图象中的，也在语言中”——但他不可能认识到，这句话对本雅明是如何重要，或者说，这句废话对本雅明是如何极端地富有意义。在大麻的影响下，他感到名字和事物属于一起，一个韵揭示了一个现实。
悲剧，或者也许是喜剧，在于这洞见，本雅明哲学工作的皇冠，无法在产生它的幻觉中存活下来。“Wellen
schwappen—Wappen schwellen”是个无意义的韵，而抬起一只手臂与亚美尼亚王国，也没有什么显见的联系。“我们在语言边缘上讨论的东西，看上去无限迷人，”本雅明顺服地写道。“我们满是爱地伸开手臂，渴望拥抱我们头脑里的东西。我们绝少触及它们，但它们要完全迷惑我们，则更加困难。在语言的触碰下，我们注意力的对象突然消失了。”大麻，像童话里邪恶的精灵，许诺了本雅明一个愿望，但又保证他无法享受到愿望实现的乐趣。
《论大麻》是一本重要著作，这是因为本雅明的毒品体验，不仅仅是个失败。它还以某种方式，改变了本雅明其他作品的基础，而作者从未承认这一点。本雅明思想的魅力，在于他对一个完美化世界的想象。其中，用他最喜欢的词语来说——事物将从囚禁它们的沉默中——得到拯救。借用犹太教传统，本雅明有时将这拯救想象成弥赛亚式的；在事业的后期，他又将拯救放进马克思主义的语汇，将其视作革命。他越来越热烈地坚持这些希望，而他坚持得越热烈，他四周的世界就变得越可怕。1940年，当纳粹看起来不可阻挡——他最后一篇重要论文《历史哲学论纲》（Theses
on the Philosophy History）的最后一句话——坚持即使在最黑暗的时刻，拯救依然可能，而每一秒钟都是“弥赛亚可能通过的，时间中的小门。”
大麻许诺的拯救如此折中和短暂，我们不得不面对这样一种可能性：它除了幻觉，什么也不是。如果本雅明在他的大麻幻觉里，发现了一种神秘的语言，那是因为他太热切地想要找到这种语言了。类似的论断，适用于他所有的弥赛亚幻想。他的作品，建立在对语言、思想、艺术、和社会深刻的洞见上，具有欺骗式的复杂性。它让人忽视，要真正生活在这作品中，是十分困难的。毕竟，如果说这世界，因没有作者而不成其为文本，那么本雅明也只是一个诗人，而不是阐释者。他创造意义，而非发现它们。他奇特、优美的工作，最终还是该读成伟大诗歌的片断——一首关于渴望的诗。没有一个世界能满足这个渴望，而本雅明的世界，尤其不可能。
注：Simonsun译自《纽约客》2006年8月21号，以下为原文
THE PHILOSOPHER
STONED
What drugs taught Walter Benjamin.
by ADAM KIRSCH
On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty
in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled “Main
Features of My First Impression of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin
that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time
he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the
books he read and the streets he wandered—like life itself—hashish was
important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.
For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with
hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until
the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated
by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in which the poet issues warnings
against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: “You know
that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious
and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded
Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired
the book’s “childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its
lack of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this
attempt independently.” The notes from his first hashish trance show him
holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. “The gates to a world
of grotesquerie seem to be opening,” he wrote. “Only, I don’t wish to
enter.” According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin smoked opium
on several occasions, “Benjamin was a smoker who refused the initial blandishments
of the smoke. He didn’t want to yield to it too readily, for fear of weakening
his powers of observation.”
Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions as either
subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude toward drugs
remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them when he was alone,
and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor friends to procure
hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The sessions were recorded
in “protocols,” furnishing raw material for what Benjamin intended to
be a major book on the philosophical and psychological implications of
drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, his best friend from the
age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then forty, listed four unwritten books
that he considered “large-scale defeats”—evidence of the “ruin or catastrophe”
that his career had become—the last was a “truly exceptional book about
hashish.”
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, a book by Walter Benjamin called
“On Hashish” has finally appeared in English, along with another long-gestated
work, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (Harvard; $14.95 each). “On Hashish”
is not, however, the “truly exceptional book” he had in mind; it’s a miscellany,
gathering the protocols of his drug experiments, two published accounts
of his experiences, and a handful of references to drugs culled from his
other works. It can only begin to suggest the true importance of drug
experiences for the development of Benjamin’s thought.
Yet for this very reason “On Hashish” stands in the same relation to a
more conventional essay on drugs as Benjamin’s literary essays do to conventional
criticism. “You hardly feel that you have been reading criticism,” Frank
Kermode noted when “Illuminations,” the first English-language selection
of Benjamin’s writings, appeared, in 1968. “It requires the kind of response
we are accustomed to give to works of art.” “Illuminations” revealed just
a few peaks from the sunken continent of Benjamin’s work, but these were
enough to establish him as a central figure in the history of modernism.
Benjamin approached every genre as a kind of laboratory for his lifelong
investigations into language, philosophy, and art, and his ideas on these
subjects are so original, and so radical in their implications, that they
remain profoundly challenging today, more than sixty-five years after
his death.
The period of Benjamin’s adulthood and achievement was 1914 to 1940, the
darkest in modern European history, and, if no one ever wrote criticism
the way he did, it is because no other critic felt the dislocations of
the time so severely. Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, into a prosperous
Jewish family, and his expectations were formed in the halcyon period
before 1914. In “A Berlin Chronicle,” a series of newspaper articles that
make up the nucleus of “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” he remembered the
feeling of bourgeois security that suffused the very furniture in his
family’s apartment:
Here reigned a species of things that was, no matter how compliantly it
bowed to the minor whims of fashion, in the main so wholly convinced of
itself and its permanence that it took no account of wear, inheritance,
or moves, remaining forever equally near to and far from its ending, which
seemed the ending of all things.
In such a home, poverty was unimaginable: “The poor· For rich children
of his generation, they lived at the back of beyond.”
In time-honored fashion, Benjamin hoped to abandon the commercial milieu
of his father, a successful antiques dealer, for a more prestigious career
as an academic. By the time the First World War began, he was already
committed to a life of scholarship and, as an opponent of the war, felt
no qualms about maneuvering to get out of military service. The best source
for Benjamin’s life in these years, Gershom Scholem’s moving yet unsentimental
memoir, “Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship,” records that the
two of them stayed up the whole night before Benjamin’s draft-board medical
exam, “while Benjamin consumed vast quantities of black coffee, a practice
then followed by many young men prior to their military physicals.” The
trick, calculated to simulate a weak heart, worked, and Benjamin was able
to spend the rest of the war in Switzerland, studying for his doctorate
at the University of Bern.
Scholem shared Benjamin’s academic ambitions and his antiwar convictions,
and their student friendship laid the groundwork for a lifetime of intellectual
debate, most of which was to take place by mail. The most important issue
between them, from the beginning, was Judaism, and the possibility of
being a Jewish intellectual in Germany. For Scholem, an ardent Zionist
who was expelled from his assimilated family for his views, the history
of Jewish mysticism gradually displaced mathematics and philosophy as
a focus of study. For Benjamin, however, Judaism remained more a possibility
to be imagined than a life to be lived. He never mastered its religious
practices or sacred texts, and, as he acknowledged to Scholem, “I have
come to know living Judaism in absolutely no form other than you.”
The friends’ divergent attitudes toward Jewishness largely determined
their subsequent careers. Neither of them entered the German university
life for which they had trained. In 1923, Scholem, changing his first
name from the German Gerhard to the Hebrew Gershom, emigrated to Palestine,
where there was no university; he planned to support himself as a schoolteacher.
As fate would have it, when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded,
shortly afterward, he was named one of the first professors, and by the
time of his death, in 1982, he had become known as the greatest modern
scholar of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin, who remained closer to home, ended
up straying much farther from his early academic path. Having taken his
doctorate in 1919, he enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to write
his Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation required for teaching
in a German university. But even as he was researching the thesis, which
became “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” Benjamin suspected that it
would never be approved by the tradition-bound faculty. The thesis, less
a historical treatise than a philosophical meditation on the nature of
allegory, was, he bragged to Scholem, “unmitigated chutzpah.”
Even worse than the possibility of being rejected, however, was the possibility
of being accepted. In February, 1925, as he prepared to submit the dissertation,
Benjamin admitted, “I dread almost everything that would result from a
positive resolution to all of this: I dread Frankfurt above all, then
lectures, students, etc.” He needn’t have worried. Although the dissertation
contains some of his most radical insights into language and literature,
his examiners rejected it, admitting that they couldn’t understand a single
page. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, then, his career took a sharp turn.
With his parents increasingly unwilling or unable to support him, he began
to earn a living as a freelance literary journalist, contributing to the
culture sections of newspapers and magazines.
The death of Benjamin the academic philosopher meant the birth of Benjamin
the cultural critic. Harvard University Press’s monumental, four-volume
edition of “Selected Writings” (from which the texts of the two new books
have, for the most part, been taken) allows the reader to chart Benjamin’s
change of direction and his increasing productivity, as he began to cater
to the demands of the literary market. All of his writing from 1913 to
1926 fits into the first volume, which is dominated by unpublished essays
on abstract topics. His first major piece of literary criticism, a long
essay on Goethe’s novel “Elective Affinities,” was not published until
1925. But from the mid-nineteen-twenties onward he became more and more
prolific. The Harvard edition’s second volume covers the seven years from
1927 to 1934, and two volumes are required for his last six years.
Much of Benjamin’s early writing, though always stamped with his oblique
intelligence, is the small change of journalism: travel pieces, book reviews,
an article on the Berlin Food Exhibition of 1928. In addition to giving
Benjamin a precarious living, such work helped him adapt his extremely
dense style, formed in the harsh school of German idealist philosophy,
into a more appealing literary instrument. Even so, his prose remained
challenging. A friend once told him, “In great writing, the proportion
between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation
was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty—whereas it
was more like one to two in [your] case.” (“All this is correct,” Benjamin
admitted.)
Benjamin’s roundabout methods can be seen in his best-known literary essays,
the examinations of Proust, Baudelaire, and Kafka published in “Illuminations.”
These contain little of what we ordinarily expect from criticism: biographical
background, information about plot and character, literary-historical
comparisons. Instead,Benjamin presents his subjects enigmatically, using
startling metaphors and emblems. His essay on Proust (whose works he helped
translate into German) is called “The Image of Proust,” and draws an implicit
parallel between the novelist’s method and the critic’s, presenting Proust
as a collector of charged images, momentary glimpses that open up passages
to the buried life. “The image detaches itself from the structure of Proust’s
sentences as that summer day at Balbec—old, immemorial, mummified—emerged
from the lace curtains under Fran·oise’s hands,” Benjamin writes. And
he responds in kind, concluding his essay with the image of Proust lying
in bed, his asthmatic prostration converted into heroic labor:
For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo’s on which
the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates
the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding them
up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.
Benjamin’s literary criticism was too unusual and too uncompromising to
win a large audience. But his admirers included some of the best living
German writers, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt Brecht. By
1930, Benjamin was confident enough to announce that his life’s ambition
was to “be considered the foremost critic of German literature.”
It is not as a literary critic that Benjamin has been most influential,
however, but as a pioneering cultural critic, one of the first writers
to see all the products of civilization as worthy of analysis. This is
the principle that guides his most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” now a canonical text in art history,
film studies, and related fields. In it Benjamin argues that, traditionally,
a painting or sculpture was endowed with something he calls “aura,” deriving
from a recognition of its absolute uniqueness. That is why thousands of
people line up every day for a quick, obscured glimpse of the Mona Lisa:
not just to see it but to be in its quasi-sacred presence. In the age
of technology, Benjamin perceived, this uniqueness is diluted by the ready
availability of reproductions, which makes it possible to see a work of
art without ever having seen the original. Furthermore, in the twentieth
century’s characteristic art forms, photography and film, there is no
such thing as an original.
Surprisingly, Benjamin welcomed the idea of art without aura. He reasoned
that aura was a kind of aristocratic mystery, and that its disappearance
should herald a new, more democratic art: “The social significance of
film, even—and especially—in its most positive form, is inconceivable
without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value
of tradition in the cultural heritage.” This rhetoric, with its enthusiasm
for “destruction” and “liquidation,” sounds distinctly odd coming from
Benjamin. How, the reader wonders, did the great champion of Proust and
Kafka end up decrying uniqueness and originality· How could the man who
compared “In Search of Lost Time” to the Sistine Chapel ceiling also believe
that “contemplative immersion” in a work of art was “a breeding ground
for asocial behavior”·
The answer lies in Benjamin’s exceedingly awkward embrace of Marxism.
Like many other intellectuals of the time, he came to feel that only Communism
could save Europe from war, depression, and Fascism. He visited the Soviet
Union in 1926, and clung to the hope that Communism would provide better
for writers than capitalism had managed to do. Benjamin’s personal circumstances
only reinforced this judgment. Literary journalism, never a lucrative
career, was an almost heroically futile one in Weimar Germany. By 1931,
Benjamin confessed that “material circumstances . . . have made my existence—with
no property and no steady income—a paradox, in view of which even I sometimes
fall into a stupor of amazement.” And when Hitler seized power, Benjamin
lost what remained of his livelihood. In March, 1933, he fled Germany
for France, never to return. For the rest of his life, he lived on the
brink of destitution. A subsidy provided by the Institute for Social Research,
itself in exile from its original base, in Frankfurt, helped him scrape
by. “My Communism,” Benjamin said, “is a drastic, not infertile expression
of the fact that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible
to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds
it impossible to accommodate my life.”
Benjamin’s Marxist turn was welcomed by friends like Brecht, who regretted
only that he hadn’t gone far enough. Scholem, on the other hand, kept
up a stream of reproaches in his letters from Palestine, thinking it nothing
more than a fashionable disguise: “There is a disconcerting alienation
and disjuncture between your true and alleged way of thinking.” And he
was infuriated by Benjamin’s refusal to acknowledge how far his idiosyncratic
understanding of Communism deviated from Party orthodoxy. “The complete
certainty I have about what would happen to your writing if it occurred
to you to present it within the Communist Party is quite depressing,”
Scholem wrote.
Benjamin never did join the Party, though he agonized over it, just as
he continually postponed his often declared plans to learn Hebrew and
move to Palestine. But his limited and private adherence to Marxist principles
had significant effects on his work—effects that tended to bear out Scholem’s
pessimism. “The Work of Art” could not have been written without Benjamin’s
newfound interest in the material conditions of cultural production. Yet
his masochistic insistence on putting his work at the service of the class
struggle also accounts for the forced belligerence and brutalism of that
essay.
The most significant casualty of Benjamin’s Marxism was “The Arcades Project,”
which today enjoys a reputation as one of the most famous books never
written. It was the white whale of Benjamin’s last years, a magnum opus
of stupendous scope and originality that he found himself perpetually
unable to finish. The Passagenwerk, as Benjamin referred to it, took its
name from the passages, or arcades, that adorned Paris in the age of Baudelaire.
These were glass-covered promenades set aside for shopping and strolling,
which helped to give the city its reputation as a paradise for flaneurs.
In the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin believed he had found
the omphalos of the modern city, with its erotic anonymity, its phantasmagoria
of fashions, its mixture of banality and enchantment.
The passages appealed to him, above all, because by his own day they were
already extinct, made obsolete by the department store. This gave them
the charm that Benjamin found in everything discarded and superseded,
all the detritus on which civilization imprints its deepest secrets. “To
someone looking through piles of old letters,” he wrote, “a stamp that
has long been out of circulation on a torn envelope often says more than
a reading of dozens of pages.” In just this way, Benjamin dreamed of using
the arcades to write the hidden history of the city he called, in one
essay, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” He initially meant
his arcades essay to be brief, allusive, and literary—“a fairy-play,”
he called it in 1928. “In any case,” he assured Scholem, “it is a project
that will just take a few weeks.”
What transformed the essay of 1928 into the thousand-page midden of notes,
fragments, and quotations that Benjamin left behind at his death, and
that was published in 1999 under the title “The Arcades Project”· Any
answer would have to include Benjamin’s constant tendency to procrastinate;
the disordered conditions of his life in the nineteen-thirties, which
made sustained research difficult; and the inherently elusive nature of
what he was trying to accomplish. Above all, however, what kept him from
completing the project was his Marxism. In the late thirties, when he
returned to it in earnest, he was determined to recast his analysis of
nineteenth-century Paris in the language of dialectical materialism. It
was in support of this project that the Institute for Social Research
granted Benjamin a subsidy, expecting a brilliant example of Marxist cultural
criticism.
But when Benjamin started to put “The Arcades Project” in something like
publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled “The Paris of
the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” he was in for a shock. Although he was
eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it proved far too clumsy
for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead of sharpening his vision of
Paris, Marxism had settled over it like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude
clichés. (For instance, he interpreted Baudelaire’s great poem about drunkenness,
“The Ragpickers’ Wine,” as a response to the wine tax.) In a devastating
letter, Adorno said that, by using “materialist categories,” Benjamin
had “denied yourself your boldest and most productive thoughts in a kind
of precensorship.” Adorno’s judgment echoed Scholem’s: Benjamin’s Marxist
vocabulary had betrayed his true insights.
This rejection, coming from a representative of Benjamin’s last remaining
sponsor, was a terrible blow. The timing made it even worse: he had worked
through the fall of 1938 to finish the essay, believing that war could
break out at any moment. “I was in a race against the war,” he told Adorno,
who was then living in New York, “and in spite of all my choking fear,
I felt a feeling of triumph on the day I wrapped up . . . before the end
of the world (the fragility of a manuscript!).” Now he was being told
that the triumph was illusory, that the Arcades Project could not be written
on the terms he proposed. Even if Benjamin had lived long enough, it is
doubtful that he could have completed it. The intellectual and ideological
basis of the work was in ruins.
In any case, history was not to give him the chance. Despite his friends’
attempts to persuade him to emigrate to England or America, Benjamin was
still in Paris in the summer of 1940, when the evil he had fled in Berlin
caught up with him. The fall of France set the stage for a secular martyrdom
that is a large part of his legend. The exact details are disputed, but
it seems that, on September 26, 1940, Benjamin was part of a group of
refugees trying to cross the Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. But the
Spanish border guards, perhaps out of deference to the Gestapo, did not
honor their visas and turned them back. In despair and exhaustion, Benjamin
took an overdose of morphine. The next morning, the guards relented, and
the rest of the party escaped over the border. Only Benjamin, buried in
the cemetery at Port Bou, remained as an exemplary victim—a reproach to
a Europe intent on murdering its Jews, its radicals, and its best minds.
Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius· A reader
who turns to “On Hashish” for a clear answer may be disappointed. Like
a small-scale version of “The Arcades Project,” it is the placeholder
for a book he could never finish, a ruin occupying the site where he planned
a monument, and, as such, it has to be carefully interpreted. This is
entirely fitting, since Benjamin himself believed that “all human knowledge,
if it can be justified, must take on no other form than that of interpretation.”
The most common kind of interpretation, of course, is reading. So deeply
ingrained is our association of the two that reading provides a metaphor
for many activities that have nothing to do with written texts: the fortune-teller
“reads” palms, the astrologer “reads” the stars. The intellectual quest
that defined Benjamin’s work—at times, it seems, the dare that he set
himself—was to find out how much of the world could be “read” in this
way. In “The Arcades Project,” he made lengthy catalogues of ephemera—advertising
posters, shop-window displays, clothing fashions—commenting, “Whoever
understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only
about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and
revolutions.”
The suspicion that everything in the world carries a hidden message seems
to have come to Benjamin at a very young age. “Berlin Childhood Around
1900” is organized as a series of vignettes, each devoted to a thing or
a place from his childhood: “The Telephone,” “The Sock,” “At the Corner
of Steglitzer and Genthiner.” The result is an eerily depopulated memoir,
in which Benjamin’s parents are mute presences, and friends are almost
entirely absent. Benjamin told Scholem that the project contained “the
most precise portrait I shall ever be able to give of myself,” and yet
it is a portrait in which the sitter never appears, his place taken by
the objects that surround him. The effect is not just to make Benjamin
seem like a lonely, wary child, though he undoubtedly was. Rather, if
Benjamin luxuriates in memories of solitude, sleepiness, and sickness,
it is because these unguarded states allowed him to communicate most intimately
with the objects around him. “Everything in the courtyard became a sign
or hint to me,” he writes in the section titled “Loggias.” “Many were
the messages embedded in the skirmishing of the green roller blinds drawn
up high, and many the ominous dispatches that I prudently left unopened
in the rattling of the roll-up shutters that came thundering down at dusk.”
Benjamin always hoped to turn his powers of reading to even more tempting
and obscure kinds of signs—astrology fascinated him—and his willingness
to indulge such ideas hints at the metaphysical, even mystical inspiration
that is at the heart of all his work, especially his understanding of
language. This affinity for the mystical was evident to Scholem, who described
Benjamin’s work as “an often puzzling juxtaposition of the two modes of
thought, the metaphysical-theological and the materialistic,” but it is
not easy for modern readers to embrace. The theological side of Benjamin’s
thought remained hidden, during his lifetime and long afterward, in part
because he chose to hide it. He never published the seminal 1916 essay
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which explicitly set
forth his mystical vision of language, or later writings that show its
continued hold on his imagination. Only with the publication of the “Selected
Writings” has it been possible for English readers to grasp the crucial
fact that the “metaphysical-theological” element of Benjamin’s thought
was older and more profound than the “materialistic” element.
Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” states,
“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that
does not in some way partake of language, for it is the nature of each
one to communicate its mental contents.” Everything in the world—stars,
faces, animals, landscapes—has a meaning, and Benjamin accepts that this
implies the existence of a cosmic author. “God,” he declares, “made things
knowable in their names.” Of course, secular reason holds that human languages
are purely conventional, but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that
words are arbitrary: “It is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view
of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its
object.” Instead, he holds that every human language is really a failed
and garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things: “It
is the translation of the language of things into that of man.”
The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely
because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so eloquently
his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents itself as mere
chaos. This longing drew him, slowly and equivocally, to hashish. In a
hashish trance, he hoped, it would be possible to understand the language
of things more directly than in ordinary life—to experience a universe
suffused with meaning.
By the time Benjamin tried drugs, he had been reading and wondering about
them for years, and when the moment finally came it proved to be a letdown,
at least in the philosophical sense. This is not to say that Benjamin
did not experience, and enjoy, all the usual effects. He felt mellow.
“Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes,”
he noted during his first attempt. He saw weird visions, such as “a long
gallery of suits of armor with no one in them. No heads, but only flames
playing around the neck openings.” He even got the munchies: “I had been
suddenly unable to still the pangs of hunger that overwhelmed me late
one night in my room. It seemed advisable to buy a bar of chocolate.”
But what Benjamin called “the great hope, desire, yearning to reach—in
a state of intoxication—the new, the untouched” remained elusive. When
the effects of the drugs wore off, so did the feeling of “having suddenly
penetrated, with their help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible
world of surfaces.” All that remained was the cryptic comments and gestures
recorded in the protocols, the ludicrous corpses of what had seemed vital
insights. In a session on April 18, 1931, Fritz Fr·nkel, a doctor who
administered the drug to Benjamin, noted, “Arm and index finger are raised
high in the air, without support. The raising of the arm is ‘the birth
of the kingdom of Armenia.’ ” During another trance, Benjamin was very
excited to have come up with the phrase “Wellen schwappen—Wappen schwellen”
(“Waves splash—armorial bearings swell”), claiming that the rhyming words
held the clue to a deep structural connection between waves and the designs
used in heraldry. “The subject holds forth in learned fashion,” Fr·nkel
noted. “ ‘Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua.’ ” Fr·nkel may have known
the meaning of the Latin phrase—“Insofar as it is in images, it is in
language”—but he could not have recognized how crucial the notion was
to Benjamin’s thought, or how tremendously significant the nonsense phrase
must have appeared to him. Under the influence of hashish, he felt that
names and things belonged together, that a rhyme had revealed a reality.
The tragedy, or perhaps the comedy, was that this insight, the crown of
Benjamin’s philosophical labor, could not survive the trance that fathered
it. In the cold light of the morning after, Wellen schwappen—Wappen schwellen
is a meaningless jingle, and the raising of an arm has no perceptible
connection to the kingdom of Armenia. “What we are on the verge of talking
about seems infinitely alluring,” Benjamin wrote resignedly. “We stretch
out our arms full of love, eager to embrace what we have in mind. Scarcely
have we touched it, however, than it disillusions us completely. The object
of our attention suddenly fades at the touch of language.” Hashish, like
an evil genie in a fairy tale, granted Benjamin’s wish, but guaranteed
that he couldn’t enjoy it.
What makes “On Hashish” an important book is that Benjamin’s drug experiments
not only were a failure in themselves but also shifted the ground beneath
his other work in a way that he never fully acknowledged. The allure of
his thought lies in his imagination of a perfected world, in which objects
would be redeemed—to use one of his favorite words—from their imprisoning
silence. Borrowing from the Jewish tradition, Benjamin sometimes imagined
this redemption as messianic; later in his career, he often cast it in
Marxist terms, seeing redemption as revolution. He clung to these hopes
more and more passionately the more terrifying the world around him became.
The last sentence of his last major essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History”—written in 1940, when Nazism seemed unstoppable—insists that
even at the darkest hour redemption remains possible, that every second
is “the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”
Hashish, by granting a vision of this redemption in such a compromised
and transient form, forces us to confront the likelihood that it was never
anything more than a fantasy. If Benjamin discovered a mystic language
in his hashish trance, it is because he so fervently wanted to discover
it. And something similar holds true for all his messianic speculations.
The beguiling complexity of his work, built out of profound insights into
language, thought, art, and society, makes it tempting to ignore the difficulty
of actually dwelling inside it. After all, if the world is not a text
because it does not have an author, then Benjamin is not an interpreter
but a poet, creating meanings rather than perceiving them. Ultimately,
his strange, beautiful works are best read as fragments of a great poem—the
poem of a longing that no world, and Benjamin’s least of all, could possibly
satisfy.