In/Comparable Intoxications: Walter Benjamin Revisited from the Hemispheric South

A little-known fact was revealed in 1988 when Karlheinz Barck published, in Zeitschrift für Germanistik, part of the correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach. One of Auerbach’s letters, directed to Benjamin’s exile address, was written in Rome on 23 September 1935, when Hitler had already been in power for over two and a half years in Germany. There we read,

Please let us know immediately where you are and how you are doing. I thought of you once, at least a year ago, when they were looking for a professor to teach German Literature at São Paulo. I found out your (then) Danish address through the Frankfurter Zeitung and communicated it to the relevant authorities—but nothing came of the matter, and it would have been pointless to write to you from Germany. ¹

We do not know whether Benjamin actually had the chance to consider this possibility of applying for an academic position that the University of São Paulo, Brazil, was offering to a foreign scholar at that time. Perhaps, due to the daily drama of exile and nomadic existence, the information was lost or arrived late. However, had Benjamin succeeded in leaving Europe before the outbreak of World War II and arrived in a Latin American country, not even mystical imagination would be capable of envisioning the direction that his intellectual presence in the world might have taken. Not surprisingly then, if we imagine a paradoxical analogy, Benjamin reemerges today at the center of narrative and conceptual projects that he himself could hardly have foreseen.

The discussion that follows was inspired by a contemporary phenomenon that I started investigating a few years ago: “narco-epics.” The term narco-epics designates transnational narrative formations that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s throughout (Latin) American literature, film, music and testimony. These narratives convey images and affective configurations of shattered life—existences that are massively endangered by privation and marginalization linked to informal labor and illicit global flows across transnational space, as these have started booming due to the pressures that were imposed on the planet by geoeconomic strategies of neoliberalism.

However, the term narco-epics turns paradoxical at the very moment we try to define it. Rather than just dealing with transnational drug traffic or with altered states of consciousness—which they do—these literatures and films use illicit exchange as a framework for addressing some of the most intricate issues of ethics and philosophy today, ² reaching far beyond the referential scope of “narcotics.” The concept of “intoxication” reemerged in an unusual way in these narratives, by calling for the term to be heuristically related to the cultural conflicts and territories of presenttime scenarios of hemispheric globalization. It became necessary that intoxication be wrested away from a certain Christian morality, from a powerful pharmacological discourse, ³ as well as from the propaganda related to the “war on drugs.” Furthermore, these narratives call for thinking beyond the efforts of numerous modern writers and artists to approach the phenomenon of hallucination/altered states of mind as creative transgression. “Intoxication” leads us to both the borders and the heart of the influential and perplexing notion of the modern Western subject in its constitution as “contained” subjectivity. The dreams and norms of containment have generated the sublime trope of reason and moderation commanding the body and its passions. When we speak of the “center” and of the “borders” of the modern enterprise of subject formation, we are dealing with highly charged cultural, “moral,” biopolitical, and geopolitical questions.

These issues suggested the need to revisit and rethink a few links in Benjamin’s conceptual imaginary. His famous essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), already dealt with exhaustively by many authors, has now started to resurface in a peculiar way. The sudden challenges it posed did not seem to find equivalent treatment in existing interpretations of surrealism. I propose the thought-figure of “in/comparable intoxications” to make a point about Benjamin’s conceptual and ethical closeness to contemporary and historical struggles in the western...