Throughout his writing on drugs Benjamin circled around the German term Rausch, usually rendered in English as “intoxication” but with deeper resonances: its underlying literal meaning of rush, roar, or thunder and, prominent for Benjamin, Nietzsche’s use of it to denote Dionysian ecstasy, the rending of the veil of appearances to reveal the primal life force. In its grip, as Benjamin wrote in his wanderings around Marseille on hashish, “images and chains of images, long-submerged memories appear”; the borders between subject and object weaken, imagination bleeds into reality, the world comes to life in new ways.

It is not purely a dream or a fantasy but “a continual alternation of dreaming and waking states, a constant and finally exhausting oscillation between totally different worlds of consciousness.” “Intoxication” suggests a transient state of impairment, but Rausch describes an “ecstasy of trance” that holds out the possibility of reenchanting the world without demanding a romantic or religious leap of faith. It is not an effect of the drug per se but “a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”

In Rausch, as he wrote at the end of his evening on hashish in Marseille, “our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like gold coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so they can thus purchase new birth.”

Excerpts (from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/21/sartres-bad-trip/?fbclid=IwAR0QoM6Qrneq_nLvVMNKi5whUxyU8IAx2e6yIDhukJUt2E3zfGVGCiTmMNg)