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 Françoise’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:

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 flâneurs. 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 Fränkel, 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,” Fränkel noted. “ ‘Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua.’ ” Fränkel 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.