All right, I need another drink before moving on to the next section.

Two philosophers up next.

I'd now like to look at some texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, who was most prolific in the 1880s, and some by Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940, as writers who provide earlier accounts of intoxication as a key to alternative interventions in the social fabric.

We find one of the most comprehensive anatomies of intoxication in Nietzsche's writing, although over the course of his life its definition and function undergo dramatic fluctuations. Nietzsche is such an attractive example of the post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida or Irigaray, partly because the phenomenal energy of his thought is entirely directed at unmasking the assumptions and prejudices that underly the intellectual and religious institutions of his time. Even better, he offers no effective substitute in their place, for that would suggest there is some meaningful purpose to our lives. He views this as a vain notion deriving from the conviction that we are in some way distinct from all other organisms. (He's saying we're not.)

This quote of his from Human All Too Human is very typical, and he says, "That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past—as treasure: for the value of our humanity depends upon it." So our sense of humanity is entirely false. It's based on an extrapolation from the errors and fantasies which precede us.

This kind of delusion is only intensified, in Nietzsche's view, by the nineteenth-century confidence in rational scientific thought as the key to economic and social progress. For Nietzsche, intoxication, which he often defines as a creative aesthetic force, is the only secure attack on what he sees as the disastrous influence of modernity whose spurious values fictionalize the material prosperity of his day as if it were the outcome of a natural process.

Returning then to the nineteenth century, the idea of a naturalized development—I think something that Nietzsche wants to undermine.

This outlook is familiar to us from the discussion of the nineteenth-century avant-gardes as they challenge the assumptions linking technology with social progress. Nietzsche's outlook is most pessimistic in Beyond Good and Evil, the title of a book he wrote, where these supposedly progressive values are shown to have crushed any human potential for full immersion in the world's delights. He regrets that only a destructive and negative revolutionary change and negative intoxication, as it were, can result from such unnatural repression.

This is not the kind of intoxication that he celebrates in other texts as the key to meaningful involvement in the world. Writing at the end of his productive life in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche is much more positive. Aesthetic intoxication dissolves the artificial separation of human and world into a continuum of Becoming where our involvement transforms things until they are "swollen, crammed, strong, supercharged with energy."

It is a return to the same misleading values, however, if we think of this as productive or purposeful. Laughter and intoxication are above all a way to get free of all illusory goals. In the end intoxication may be no more than what in Human All Too Human he calls a "useless squandering," where, as we have already heard, there is no real goal to life. He continues: "But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings."

So he's claiming that in fact this wastefulness, this squandering, may be all there is, and it's something from which we can derive huge enjoyment.

This is a fulfillment in extreme self-expenditure, a kind of ultimate intoxication. We come across it again in Walter Benjamin's intoxicated reverie at the close of his essay, "Hashish in Marseilles," where with a kind of optimistic nihilism, he resigns with pleasure to the inevitability of a life frequently squandered, as in erotic meetings or while under a drug trance, seduced by all encountered phenomena.

Where Nietzsche's philosophical engagement has him wrestling with fundamental ideas on a grand, operatic scale (consider here his interest in Wagner, who he supported at the start of Wagner's career as the great hope of German culture, and then Nietzsche turned against Wagner at the end of his life), whereas Nietzsche focuses on these grand ideas, Benjamin focuses on the microcosm. As a critical Marxist aesthetician, Benjamin is interested to know why the relation between politics and culture is so much more unstable than had been assumed. Although at times, under the influence of Brecht, he veers towards accepting an instrumental relation between the two, he usually gravitates towards less predictable interpretations where the relationship between politics and art breaks down, allowing him to explore the cracks in the fractured mirror that reflects each into the other.

He has the idea, for example, that the demands of function and commerce have suppressed the utopian aims embodied in the architectural and engineering products of the nineteenth century—and this is a strange idea; Benjamin feels that within these art forms, or engineering forms, lies a concealed utopian goal, potential, which was covered over by their commercial use—products, for example, or manifestations like urban development, dioramas, factories, the arcades, the great exhibitions, department stores, railways, photography, lithography (products which are the outcome of the scientific optimism deplored by Nietzsche and the avant-gardes).

If these utopian aims can be reawakened in the present, they will explode into revolutionary action, freeing us from the repressive legacies of the nineteenth century. It is as if a new kind of intoxication is needed to awaken us from those intoxications like commerce and anarchism, which anaesthetise the nineteenth century. There is an infectious mixture of Surrealist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, utopian, messianic, and even science-fiction components to this vision.

But Benjamin is also focused on the nature of our experience of the present, and here we see a range of finely calibrated enthusiasms for all aspects of his surroundings. He shapes his writing on the cities he knows well—Naples, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles—as if in the process of tuning in to the idiosyncratic vitality of each place. He soaks up the evidence of how a city's inhabitants endure desperate conditions as a chronicle of resourcefulness to set against the usual glamorization of poverty.

In Naples the interpenetration of street and house, the food stands set up in windows and doorways, the children out at all hours, are a way of coping, in fact, with crowded one-room apartments, nothing picturesque at all. In Moscow in 1927 he is struck by a similar variety of street trading, but in the extreme cold it is conducted in silence. He chronicles the poorer traders, the beggars, the street children, noting their techniques for survival. There is always this effort by him to develop a deep cross-section of these cities from state institutions right down to those barely surviving on the streets. He is always allowing his senses to collect information, sights, smells, tastes, to set against an analytical understanding, and you feel that Benjamin is validating his political analysis by the intimacy of these encounters.

Writing on Surrealism in 1929, Benjamin sees intoxication as the key to a transformed relationship with the world. In a similar way to what we find with Nietzsche, it is intoxication which will penetrate beneath the veneer of the nineteenth century to release its revolutionary energies. Benjamin's intoxication is meant in the broadest sense as an intensification of everyday experiences, something that can occur even through reading, contemplation, or just hanging out.

If revolution is to succeed it must be linked to revolt where we are transformed by new experience of the most ordinary aspects of life. This is a counterpart, perhaps an alternative, to the expectation that revolutionary action must be antagonistic. In an extension of this Surrealist insight, Julia Kristeva has articulated a form of benign revolt, what she calls "a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances." She sees this enacted in art as the reassessment of forms of representation which develop a relationship with the world as a form of surrender and remolding, and not just as violence.

Now returning to our earlier discussion, it's at the very close of "Hashish in Marseilles" where Benjamin writes of intoxication as "that squandering of our own existence that we know in love." In this radical act of self-forgetting, this identification with the world spreads out in all directions simultaneously, and again quoting, nature "now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence." Again that sense of waste, productive waste.

This falling under the spell of ordinary things acquires transformative force in the essay. Benjamin forms a new kind of plangent language; the trance speaks as if the path taken by a revolution will be determined by the terminology used to foment it. Experience here is formulated in murmurs; for example, he is alarmed in the course of the narrative that a shadow might harm the paper on which he's writing, and is then concerned that his selection from a menu in a restaurant will offend the other items on offer. This is the intimacy of intoxication proposing a way towards a peaceful revolution, hoped for, but not expected, by Nietzsche.