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This essay treats a segment of modern culture that appears as a motif in the writings of Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin: the vacant holiday, a space on the calendar once reserved for days of ritual recollection but a space that has since lost its ceremonial function and declined into leisure time, or mere idle time. This motif will be interpreted here as the index to a certain cultural nostalgia, a loaded term given the fact that in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin, nostalgia points to a deep connection between historical perception, temporality of experience, and theological remembrance. More than that, though, it rests on a presupposition that theological categories do not cease to be illuminating or valid in contexts where religious rites have been pushed to the margins and ceased to claim the imagination. So my intention here is not simply to take up a contrarian viewpoint but rather to probe a real if elusive cultural and historical complex.1
The Theological as a Marginal Category
A familiar image for the place of theology in modern culture is that of Walter Benjamin's angel in the ninth of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History." The angel, powerless either to stay in the present or retreat into the past, is blown into the future by an irresistible wind. The figure of the angel is usually interpreted as a modern allegory for history, yet in that interpretation the theological level of the angel's meaning-a level whose presence is due as much to the allegorical nature of the figure as it is due to its angelic nature-is largely lost. At best the theological survives as a default: it is what hovers there in reserve when every other category of explanation or sense fails. This is precisely the place theology occupies in the first of the theses where it makes an ironic appearance as a hunchback dwarf ("buckliger Zwerg").2 The truth is that it is ugly and ought to be kept out of sight, but the truth is also that history cannot definitively renounce its promise as the only valid form of remembrance. Thus, Benjamin's angel crystallizes the problematic status of theology in his work. In an often-cited passage from a letter Benjamin described the relation of his work to theology...