The Holocaust attests to the monstrous link between industrial chemistry, the European Jews and modernity. Two histories intersected in the Holocaust, the history of anti-Semitism and the history of the German organic chemistry. The latter was a powerful industrial weapon in the hands of the new nation capable of developing chemical weapons as much as combating the nation’s hunger. This “progress” coincided in time with the nation’s growing racial fantasies about its Jewish populations as if they were internal enemies. In retrospect the Holocaust was the point of industrial realization of the nation’s death wish for the technological demolition of its Jewish population. This being the Nazi’s dream as it were, we can posit the existence of the “Jewish-chemical complex” as the nation’s industrial and infrastructural unconscious, a mixture of poisonous chemicals and dreams. To paraphrase Avital Ronell, technological infrastructure was already put in place “prior to the production of that materiality” (1992, 33) called Holocaust, that is, rational chemical schemes already strategically synchronized poisonous molecules, machines, barbwires and buildings with the nation’s death wish in order to manufacture collective catastrophe as the industry’s end product. In retrospect the German mass production of morphine, cocaine much as the Zyklon B historically and structurally was inseparable from the “Jewish-chemical complex” and the nation’s phantasmagoria of the Jew as an internal enemy.
Freud and Benjamin each in their own way fell prey to the “Jewish-chemical complex.” They held different views on modernity and they preferred different drugs—Freud preferred cocaine and Benjamin preferred hashish—but the two Central European Jews in exile both died by overdose of morphine: for Freud it was a mercy killing, and in Benjamin’s case, it was suicide. According to a witness, Benjamin took a large dose of morphine on September 26, 1940, on the Spanish French border and left a suicide note for Theodor Adorno, “I could not go on, I don’t see any way out” (In Scholem 1981, 226), and yet morphine had facilitated a “way out” from Nazi reality. One could have seen Benjamin’s suicide being in the making already in 1931 by reading his diary:
Freud’s personal doctor Max Schur described the last moments of Freud’s painful agony on September 23, 1939; while exiled in London at the very end of his life, according to the scenario, the two of them had agreed to long before:The universal reservations toward one’s own way of life, which are forced upon every writer-without exception, I believe-by contemplation of the situation in Western Europe, are related in a bitter way to the attitude toward other human beings that is induced in the drugtaker by the poison he takes. And to take the full measure of the ideas and impulses that preside over the writing of this diary, I need only hint at my growing willingness to take my own life. (2006, 135)
In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud wrote: “Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task” (In Schur 1972, 529); one such accomplishment, we may add, was to live during the Jewish catastrophe. The political context of Freud’s death adds extra meaning to “accomplishment.” Not only were Freud’s well-known works accomplished but on the flipside also the Nazi scheme of racial purity by means of the industrial demolition of the Jews was accomplished. Certainly, neither Freud nor Benjamin died in a gas chamber, but there existed a “special” relation between the suicides of the Central European Jews and the gas industry. For instance, Benjamin’s notebook registered in the summer of 1939 that Viennese gas companies, which had been ordered by the Nazi authorities to stop supplying gas to the Jews, were complaining about losing money because the Jews were their major customers; the report also acknowledged an additional loss: “The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide” (In Arendt 1968, p. 46). The German pharmaceutical industry similarly registered between the two world wars alarmingly high rates of Jewish suicide and addiction to cocaine and morphine (Efron 2001, 182; Goeschel 2009, 101).When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated this dose after about twelve hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and died not to wake up again. (1972, 529)
One could also read the German “Jewish-chemical complex” allegorically. The last moments of Freud’s and Benjamin’s lives revealed that both minds had ready-made scenarios for how to end their lives with morphine. In light of their works’ Messianic visions, one could discern their morphine’s dialectical gesture of ending Jewish exile like an industrialized return to the lost Paradise; with morphine they “corrected” the one “choice,” so to say, they could not have made, namely, not to be born at the time of the Jewish catastrophe. With this hypothesis, and considering Benjamin’s and Freud’s secular theologies, their industrial self-demolitions by morphine invoke a pharmaceutical allegory of Umkehrung (reversal) of a Biblical beast, as if a pharmaceutical beast were providing them with a way out from hell into the world beyond “good and evil.” For both thinkers, European modernity was an enigma to which drugs as Plato’s pharmakon (Derrida 1981) promised a deciphering only to seemingly fall prey to the very enigma they hoped to decipher. The cancer of his jaw could not prevent Freud from smoking over 20 cigars per day; in his pocket Benjamin carried a bottle of morphine just in case he decided to kill himself. These biographical details attest to the possible pessimistic answer to each man’s enigma, namely, that there is no way out of “our narcotic modernity” (Ronell 1993, 59), except through modernity’s narcotic way out.
So, this book is not about the problem of addiction but about the two languages of intoxication at the time of high modernity. Both Freud’s cocaine language and Benjamin’s hashish language were constitutive of “our narcotic modernity” and had generated two somewhat different conceptions of modernity. While in the background of the industrial unconscious of the “Jewish-chemical complex” their overlapping demonologies, Messianic visions, science and “profound illumination,” psychology and Marxism, as well as their languages of intoxication, ran on phantasmagorical “counterphantoms” (Derrida 2003, 28) in order to neutralize the poisonous phantom of modernity. The poisons of industry, colonialism and ultimately Nazism prevailed, leaving behind their two languages as ashes of their ecstasies and linguistic trances.
Without pretending to have definite answers to these questions, and even less to claim any kind of drug-related expertise, this book nonetheless hopes to capitalize on the enigma of “narcotic modernity.” When Lenny Bruce confessed in his Messianic moment of heroin: “I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God” (Markel 2011, 73), he seemed to articulate the enigma of heroin as an antidote to life as a living hell. That “life is a hell” sounds quite plausible in the face of today’s planetary catastrophe of industrial self-demolition witnessed as a bad collective dream apparently with no option of awakening. In the face of this environmental catastrophe spearheaded by corporate Christianity intoxicated with the Biblical promise of a New Jerusalem, this oil-flooded Paradise, Lenny Bruce’s heroin’s Messianic moment could be retroactively interpreted as a demonic conversion of the present moment of collective fossil-fuel narcosis into a painful parody: “We’ll burn down the planet, but it’s like kissing God.”
Where are the lines of distinction between individual and collective narcosis, between global warming and the present-day heroin epidemic, between burning the brain cells and the planet? One thing Lenny Bruce made clear is that our narco-catastrophe leaches off the false promise of recovering our lost transcendence, which suggests a metaphysical rather than a chemical addiction. As Jacques Derrida put it, “When the sky of transcendence comes to be emptied, not just of Gods, but of any Other, a fatal rhetoric fills the void, and this is the fetishism of drug addiction” (2003, 29). Freud’s and Benjamin’s secular Messianic inspirations too underpinned their languages of intoxication in hopes of filling the void with a material reconstruction of the lost Paradise. “Drug addiction” as an enigmatic craving for the impossible and “drug addiction” as an expert knowledge about a craving for a substance are not one and the same. And yet they relate in a profound way; the agency, which invented “drug addiction” as an expert narrative in its outlook is the surrogate of the very industry that had found rational means to map out and integrate the body chemistry into industrial chemistry. Blaming chemicals for the addiction rather than the chemistry this expert knowledge reduces the enigma of drugs to a fake enigma of individualized addiction only to conceal the ongoing pharmaceutical conquest of nerves vested in the powers of the industrial theology of drugs (Dumit 2012). The history of colonialism and the birth of global capitalism speak to this point. Consider the fact that the profit generated by the conquest of the British palate by sugar had transformed the slave economy into the industrial revolution, which speaks to the model of industrial capitalism as a system of self-propelled intoxication.
The other reading of “drug addiction” as a promise of impossible transcendence, which this book is about, at least in the Benjaminian utopian key of Jetztzeit, as an antidote to narcotic modernity, could be understood as an exercise in dialectical detoxification by way of antidotal intoxication. The industrial theology of drugs in such dialectical reversal has to be converted into a political theology of drugs.
With certainty we can claim that because they are the conditions of impossibility, drugs in themselves are impossible objects. Various discourses, not only medical or chemical but also legal, philosophical, aesthetical, moral, religious and so on, constitute the incoherent reality of drugs (Derrida 2003, 20). Ironically or not, this convoluted, incoherent, fragmented set of drug narratives, with no beginning and no end, and with only a here and now in ad hoc constructions of argument, resembles the structure of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Considering the intoxicating fragmentation of nineteenth-century Paris, one can argue that by extension, drug narratives themselves run on some sort of dope and are toxic to the core.
Freud’s discourse on cocaine and Benjamin’s discourse on hashish are two such discourses of intoxication, both constitutive parts of “our narcotic modernity,” but in different keys. The task here is not to survey the theories of modernity as narcotic (chemically or symbolically) but rather to analyze a specific understanding of modernity as a phantasmagoria in terms of two specific languages of intoxication. A point of caution: by no means am I suggesting a causal relationship between drugs and these languages, but rather that the narratives forge a strategic alliance between the reason and poison in order to induce a phantasmagorical mimesis of modernity and thus decode its enigma. Given that cocaine and hashish signified colonial and industrial history, the book will contextualize historically Freud’s and Benjamin’s languages of intoxication.
Mimesis
The book pivots around Benjamin’s doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty both as an innate faculty and as a language-based faculty. Benjamin used mimesis as a way of seeing the similarities between sensuous and non-sensuous de-similarities in two ways, as a dialectical idea positioned against what he regarded as the industrial catastrophe of simulations or industrial phantasmagoria, and as a method of studying and applying mimesis as a dialectical idea in order to awaken the senses and uses of mimetic imagination. Benjamin departed from the Aristotelian notion of mimesis as an imitation of nature and preferred to see mimesis in terms of technology or craft as techne, producing something new yet similar to the old. As such he differentiates two types of mimetic technologies, the first technology belonging to nature and to the sensuous experience of sameness between natural plant and animal forms, while the second or collective technology belonging to language’s “mimetic canon” and to a non-sensuous experience of sameness.
One of Benjamin’s inspirations was Goethe’s morphological study of plants as a case of nature’s mimesis, or the metamorphoses of living forms, as “the first technology.” Goethe’s account of nature’s mimesis grew out of the poet’s own dialectical response to what he had perceived as a catastrophe of scientific and political revolutions. Rather than recognizing life as nature’s mimesis in its own right and as the essence of the innermost aspect of being human, science and technology aimed at altering human beings instead. Goethe confronted the myth of technology as an instrument of progress in a linear and accumulative teleology with his vision of technology in accordance with what the Greeks called techne, a technology of the metamorphosis of life. To this end, Goethe placed his trust in sense experience. “Man himself, when he makes use of his own sound senses, is the greatest and most precise physical apparatus that can exist; and the great catastrophe of modern physics is that in it experiments have, as it were, been separated off from man, and aim … to know Nature simply by virtue of what artificial instruments reveal” (In Benjamin S.W. II 1999, 173). Adopting the famous line from Faust, “Im Anfang war die Tat” (“In the beginning was the deed”), Benjamin places the deed of mimesis at the beginning not only of life but also of all things made, and above all of humanity as a whole, which he will call, as did Goethe, the primal phenomenon, Urphänomen. This term stands for a simple visible idea encompassing all diverse forms of organic life, which Benjamin extended to human history.
Hashish put Benjamin’s mimesis to work. Hashish would free his associative faculty like the child at play; with a childlike physiognomic gaze on the surface of things he would disassociate them from their conventional schemes and re-associate them in new and unexpected relations of similarities. Putting emphasis on mimesis as the deed, the point is, as he insisted, in “replicating the process which generate such similarities” (S. W. II, 698). While adults had over time lost their sense of mimetic deeds, these deeds are still evident in the child and in the child’s play of endless conversions of characters, “the child plays of being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train” (S.W. II, 694), which Benjamin uses as imaginative inspiration for his own dialectical mimesis. 1 The child as the agent of an innate mimetic faculty represents for Benjamin the transitional point from nature to history or from Goethe’s natural to Benjamin’s human history; through the play of mimetic conversions, the phylogenetic and ontogenetic interact as if they were macro- versus micro-cosmoses. Ancient astrology a long time ago, Benjamin recalls, had possessed this insight; the reintroduction of such insight at the time of modernity has for its goal to work as intoxicating “stimulants and awakeners of the mimetic faculties” (S.W II, 695). This becomes a particularly relevant antidotal imperative against the industrial abstractions and intoxicating effects of the commodity fetish. Mimesis is also a term covering two orders of technologies, the natural and the human, or the first and the second. Both mimeses operated on the dialectical principles of internal contradictions, which force a new form to evolve from the old one. While hashish belongs to the first technology, Benjamin’s hashish language belongs to the second. The first is infrastructural to the second.
Benjamin’s hashish mimesis as deed was more than just a mental exercise in free association, even less so of recreation, but it had revolutionary entitlement. It served as a dialectical training exercise for configuring Benjamin’s Marxist revolutionary doctrine in a new key, configuring how to put the “collective technology” of social life to work according to a new associative complex. Benjamin’s hashish imagination extended the dissociative mimesis from things to the conventional Marxist evolutionary doctrine of revolution, only to re-associate it with his Messianic vision of unexpected radical rupture as a condition of revolution, the arrival of the Messiah. The Messiah’s sudden entry into the present can be complemented only with revolutionary delirium. Revolution as mystery event would come only through hashish-like hallucination. As Fredric Jameson put it:
Benjamin sought a different kind of figuration for this ultimate Event of our collective social life, this ultimate mystery, when he had recourse to the language of the Messianic, trying thereby to convey—against linear notions of historical accumulation and progress (which he attributed to the Second and Third International fully as much as bourgeois thinking)—the way in which Messiah arrives at the most unexpected moment, through some small lateral door in the historical present. It is a supreme event that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that went before, or even anything that transpired in the seconds immediately preceding the sudden apparition of this utterly new rea...