the tehologica remainder in leopardi, baudelaire

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Vacant Holidays: The Theological Remainder in Leopardi, Baudelaire,and Benjamin

Baker, J. M.

MLN, Volume 121, Number 5, December 2006 (Comparative LiteratureIssue), pp. 1190-1219 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mln.2007.0000

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V c nt Holid ys:Th Th ologic l R m ind r in

L op rdi, B ud l ir , nd B nj min

J. M. Baker, Jr.

This essay treats a segment o modern culture that appears as a moti inthe writings o Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin: the vacant holiday,a space on the calendar once reserved or days o ritual recollectionbut a space that has since lost its ceremonial unction and declinedinto leisure time, or mere idle time. This moti will be interpretedhere as the index to a certain cultural nostalgia, a loaded term giventhe act that in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Benjamin, nostalgia pointsto a deep connection between historical perception, temporality o experience, and theological remembrance. More than that, though,it rests on a presupposition that theological categories do not ceaseto be illuminating or valid in contexts where religious rites have beenpushed 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 i elusive cultural and historical complex.1

The Theological as a Marginal Category

A amiliar image or the place o theology in modern culture is that o Walter Benjamins angel in the ninth o the Theses on the Philoso-phy o History. The angel, powerless either to stay in the present orretreat into the past, is blown into the uture by an irresistible wind.The gure o the angel is usually interpreted as a modern allegory orhistory, yet in that interpretation the theological level o the angelsmeaninga level whose presence is due as much to the allegorical

MLN 121 (2006): 11901219 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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nature o the gure as it is due to its angelic natureis largely lost. At best the theological survives as a de ault: it is what hovers there

in reserve when every other category o explanation or sense ails.This is precisely the place theology occupies in the rst o the theses where it makes an ironic appearance as a hunchback dwar (buck-liger Zwerg).2 The truth is that it is ugly and ought to be kept out o sight, but the truth is also that history cannot de nitively renounceits promise as the only valid orm o remembrance. Thus, Benjaminsangel crystallizes the problematic status o theology in his work. Inan o ten-cited passage rom a letter Benjamin described the relationo his work to theology as like that o a blotter to ink: rom the point o view o the blotter he would gladly orget what was written there,and nevertheless it was saturated with it. Theology in this sense is theremainder that involuntarily returns even when one wishes it away.Benjamins angel is an allegory in precisely the sense he attributed toBaudelaire: Allegories are the sites on which Baudelaire made amends

or his destructive impulse (GS I 669).3 The allegorical intention Ben- jamin ascribes to Baudelaire combines contrary theological impulses:the will to destruction and the will to salvation. The process by whichthe past disintegrates into allegorical ruins is also the prehistory toanother time glimpsed through those ruins. This is the dialecticalturn in Benjamins theory o history; its theological element echoeseven as it is elided.4

The peculiar dialectic I trace here is one in which the relevance o theological categories returns not in spite o but as a consequence o the very emptying o sacred rites and cults. It is within this paradoxi-cal development that I want to recon gure, to borrow a word rom

Nietzsche, the untimeliness o Baudelaire and Leopardi. The theologi-cal is not a concealed presence in Leopardi and Baudelaires texts which, once revealed, mani ests itsel as their secret or latent core.On the contrary, ollowing the kind o antinomian logic developedby Adorno rom Kant and Hegel, I wish to make the argument that the anti-theological moment in Baudelaire and Leopardi has to be

aced on its own terms, reading the theological, inso ar as it is to beread at all, not in spite o or beyond the antitheological, but inside

it. Secularization, or the exclusion o the sacred, is the matrix within which the theological has to be read, i it is to be read at all.5In this respect the work that most deeply replicates my own concerns

is Giorgio Agambens essay, The Melancholy Angel, where he ollowsBenjamin in identi ying the crisis in tradition as the nerve center o Baudelaires work.6 For Benjamin, Baudelaires exemplarity lay in his


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1192 J. M. BakeR, JR.

making the intransmissibility o the past the condition and themeo his poetry. The rupture in the transmissibility o the past is what

Benjamin named the shock experience paradigmatic or modernity. Agamben points out the internal irony o this development. Theprestige o the past, as a sum o objects or collection and preserva-tion, has steadily increased even as this same past has lost its authority.Even as the past remains present and available in ways that it never was be oreand this phenomenon has become all the more truesince Benjamins timeit has simultaneously become lost to us. Thedi erence between Agambens approach and my own is that whereashe sees art as the last disappearing link to the pastdisappearingbecause its subject is its own alienation rom the past it citesmy concern is with the theological as that remainder o the past whichsurvives ripped out o context.7

The voiding o holiday time in the writings o Leopardi and Baudelairetakes place at or near the beginning o the great modern expansion o industrial capitalist societies. My particular ocus, however, is the workso two poets who, while intent on proving the dignity and privilegeo art in a hostile age, also eared that art had become irrelevant.8 InHans-Georg Gadamers terms, they clung to the celebratory, or estival,character o artthe notion that art renders the texture o historicalexperience perceptible in a way that a historical record cannot andthus realizes, or presents, in an eminent way, historical timewhilealso losing any con dence in the durability o estival time within themodern economy. The perception that the holiday is no longer the

gure and promise o a plenary time but rather something essentially

void is a central moti in BenjaminsArcades Project , the perceptionoriginating in his reading o Louis AragonsPaysan de Paris and the work o Baudelaire. Benjamins own response to this development wasto elaborate a conception o messianic time, by which he understoodthe bringing to a standstill o the mere ongoing successionthe und immer so weiter o historical occurrence. But rather than simply repeat or reinscribe Benjamins post-secular view o historical time, nolonger governed either by a theological teleology or by the teleology

o bourgeois progress, I wish to provide a ramework that allows usto see how his conception o historical time rst emerged and what it was replacing. In re erring to an older theological conception o the holiday, I wish to show that its voiding in the works o poets likeBaudelaire and Leopardi does not spell out its nal abolition but rather prepares the way or something like Benjamins own, perhaps


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in part unintended, restitution o a theological moment in the con-ception o history.

Leopardi and Baudelaire never entered the calendar o productive,bourgeois society. They inhabited worlds that ran to a di erent clock,in nitely slow by the standards o the modern world but with a kindo duration long since lost to the post-Taylor workplace o measuredtime. That is why their poetry is lled with gures, scenes, and per-ceptions that, though tied to a moment and place, seem not to date. According to Benjamin these moments and scenes are not data o history but rather data o a prehistory. Their witness is raised up withthem out o time (Illuminations 18182;GS I 63739). Their antithesisis ound in the prose poem Les Foules [Crowds], but in act thetwo attitudes know an intimate internal bond. Because communing with the anonymous crowd is not a sustainable attitude it inevitably drives the Baudelairean sel back to another state in which the desire

or communion and mingling has been exhausted and orgotten.Nothing mediates the polar attitudes o withdrawn communing withsel and ecstatic but anonymous commingling with the other. Thisunmediated polarity in orms the peculiar tension o metropolitan li eanalyzed later by Simmel.9

Thus Benjamin writes:

The man who loses his capacity or experiencing eels as though he isdropped rom the calendar. The big-city dweller knows this eeling on Sun-days . . . The bells, which were once part o holidays, have been dropped

rom the calendar, like the human beings. They are like the poor souls that wander restlessly, but outside o history. I Baudelaire in Spleen and Vieantrieure holds in his hands the scattered ragments o genuine historicalexperience, Bergson in his conception o thedure has become ar moreestranged rom history. (Illuminations 18485;GS I 643)

Benjamin says that Bergson is estranged rom history because he sub-stitutes the interior experience o temporality or the more genuineexperience Benjamin equates with history.10In theArcades Project Benja-min identi es the impoverishment o the experience with commodity capitalism and with the meaning o allegory in Baudelaires poetry:

The allegories [in Baudelaires poems] stand or what the commod-ity has made out o the experiences that people in this century have(PW 413). The withering o experience stands behind the reduction,the shrinking o experiencein the sense o Er ahrung , experiencelinked to the pastto the level o souvenir, or token memory. Benjaminre ers to Prousts comment on the strange segmentation [trange


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sectionnement] o time in Baudelaire, the huge gaps between therare signi cant day and the nameless rest (PW 390).

The remainder o this essay should be seen as an extended exegesiso Benjamins poetically terse and dense representation o Baudelaireshistorical situation. The brie passage quoted condenses some o theprimary themes o his late work: the pro anation o sacred time; therupture in tradition that leaves individuals without a sense o histori-cal compass; the sense not that the past has disappeared but that it has been ragmented and, as ragments, returns in uncanny ways tohaunt the present. An example o that haunting and estrangement lies ready at hand in poem LXXIV o Les Fleurs du Mal,the sonnet entitled La Cloche Fle [The Cracked Bell], where Baudelairedraws a hollow contrast between the resonance o church bells ring-ing through the damp mists o winter nights and the metaphoricalcloven bell o his own heart. O the latter he says it is weak and without resonance, expiring with immense but ine ectual e orts. I say thiscontrast is hollow because the vigor o the church bell, to which thespeaker contrasts his own rasping voice, is itsel an extinct vigor. Theprivative relation o poetry to the world is like that o religion.11 Thebells resonance is not its own but purely the resonance that it has asit reaches the solitary consciousness o the speaker rom out o thedepth o his own memory, alone with his own disconsolate thoughts ona winter evening. The poem sets up a contrast between external andinternal that is in act a double interiority and a double recession: thepoets withdrawal rom the world outside and inside that withdrawala disa ected all through the chambers o memory.

The Sunday of Life

With good reason Hegel, in theLectures on Aesthetics,called the vividrepresentations o everyday li e by painters o the Dutch Golden Age like Pieter de Hooch the Sunday o li e.12 For these paintings, whether they showed the boisterous li e o a village church air orthe sel -absorbed quiet o an interior, represented to his mind abourgeois satis action with li e within the boundaries o secular time

that nevertheless included the quality o ul lled, or sacred, time.More than a century later, and there ore with an inevitable degree o ironic nostalgia, Ernst Bloch would essentially reiterate Hegels view:The room and the window acing the street are painted in a way as i there were no disturbance in the world. The grand ather clockalways strikes the evening hour. There is nothing that people could


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not cope with. Nothing is urgent.13 The orce o the image is iconic;it is exactly the opposite o the window and the street in Baudelaire,

whose very vacuity is urgent. Whereas in this world time is manage-able, never urgent, in Baudelaire time presses with its emptiness.14 In Leopardis idylls and hymns numerous passages appear where therelaxed, care ree time o village or small-town li e is briefy recollected with a palpable immediacy. The two idylls discussed below (La seradel d di esta and Il sabato del villaggio) come to mind but alsoA Silvia and Le Ricordanze. In these poems, as in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the idyllic atmosphere tends to e ace thedistinction between the rituals o everyday li e and those o holiday time, as i the di erence between the two consisted merely in givingthose rituals a greater amplitude.15 But therein also lies the di er-ence. For Leopardi the idyllic holiday time is not present time but a recollected time infected with the pathos o distance. Recollectedtime is purely memorial.

Hegels phrase Sunday o li e has in this respect a special relevanceor Leopardi and Baudelaire that Blochs borrowing does not spell

out. In Blochs utopian hermeneutic, idyllic scenes o Sunday rest likede Hoochs are not historical pictures but rather instances o what he calls Vorschein: anticipative images o a uture social well-being.The past is fecked with such pictures o happiness but the past doesnot represent their ul llment. In Hegel, though, the situation is di -

erent, inasmuch as or him Sunday o li e is at once an aestheticand a historical term, designating the peculiar material ideality o Dutch culture. In her analysis o Hegels place in the reception o seventeenth-century Dutch painting Christiane Hertel points out

that Hegels discussion highlights the comic element o Dutch art asthe seat o its ideality.16 It is the comic element that incorporates the vulgar realities o seventeenth-century history under the appearance(Schein) o art, thereby redeeming appearances. But this appearanceo Dutch artthe German word Schein means both appearance andillusionis not in any way to be construed as a ruse or deception. When Hegel speaks o the Farbenmagie [color magic] with whichDutch art achieves its e ect o serene complacency, o the image o

contentment within a short horizonBloch notes that de Hoochs vistas do not go beyond a couple hundred metershe is not speakingo an isolated, purely aesthetic e ect. On the contrary, that color magicis the thing that realizes in a spiritual way the historical reedom that Holland had won as a Protestant bourgeois society (Hertel 2527, 30). When, there ore, Hegel judged his German contemporaries imitations


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o Dutch genre painting to be de cient, his judgment was, in thecomprehensive sense o the term, an art-historical judgment. He was

not speci ying a ailing in nineteenth-century German arts techniquebut rather a spiritual (geistig) limitation o that art.In Hegels interpretation Dutch arts proper content, or substance,

lies in its character as a document o a historical present and that pres-ents memorial. In appearance a purely descriptive, present-orientedart, in its substance it exempli es the Protestant internalization(Verinnerlichung) o the past.17 Hegel understood the philosophi-cal and historic as well as theological signi cance o the Protestant interpretation o the Christian Sabbath as a memorial rite. That thebasic Christian event o the Eucharistic sacri ce is internalized inProtestant theology as a memorial event entails, rom the Hegelianpoint o view, not an attenuation o the original commemorated event but rather its trans ormation, in both an active and passive sense. Put dialectically, what appears to be the dissolution o the holiday intothe everyday is a mutual assimilation in which the everyday is raisedup and trans ormed. Hegel saw such a merging o art with religiousand political culture in the Dutch Republic. For this reason Dutch art counts in his aesthetic as the mature example o painting as a Romanticart orm. It is in this precise sense, and not in the simplistic sense o theme as subject matter, that Hegels is a content-based aesthetic.18 Without making the point as such, Hegels aesthetic creates parameters within which sacred, estival time is imaginable alongside, and without prejudice to, secular time. At the same time the conditions in whichtheir coexistence remains possible become exceedingly rare.

Blochs singling out o the clock as a benign presence in the

bourgeois interior is a telling detail. In the course o the nineteenthcenturys increasing regulation and normalization o the workplace,the clock acquired the symbolic status o a policeman or censor. Theclock was, according to Marx, the rst automatic machine applied topractical purposes; the whole theory o production o regular motion was developed rom it.19 With the clock as the regulator o time the workday was split into alienated time, labor dedicated to the produc-tion o surplus value, and the time necessary or the reproduction o

the labor orce. Economy o time, in the end all economy is reducedto this, writes Marx (Dohrn-van Rossum 9). Prior to Baudelaire, Marxand Engels had already noted the resentment workers bore toward the

actory bell and clock.20 And rom their vantage point utopia, or theliberation rom working time, would consist in the ability to infuencehistorical time, to change the economy o time.


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In this context it is worth mentioning that P. J. Proudhon, who Jose Pieper notes was dismissed by Marx as a petit bourgeois, began his

theorization o a socially just economy with a little essay on the socialutility o Sunday celebrations. There he makes the ollowing remarkquoted by Pieper: discussion about work and wages, organization andindustry, which is so ri e at present, ought, it seems to me, to start with the study o a law which would have at its basis a theory o rest.21 This is the same Proudhon o whom the young Baudelaire was once apartisan. According to T. J. Clark, Baudelaire shared with Proudhonthe resentment against the world as God created it. That is or Clarkthe meaning o Baudelaires Satanism: it is an impotent anger at thedivorce between dream and action, between the sacred promise andthe real.22 In that divorce the two things become indi erent becauseequally ounded upon a nothing, as Baudelaire writes in Le Gou re[The Abyss]: Hlas! tout est abme,action, dsir, rve, / Parole![Alas! everything is an abyssaction, desire, dreams, / Words!] The vacuous and nevertheless pressing temporality that, in the same poem,Baudelaire calls a nightmare without respite (un cauchemar . . .sans trve) is the opposite o that seventeenth-century clock whosehour strikes with no sense o urgency.

The contradictions in the cultural physiognomy I am describingare nowhere more evident than in Walter Benjamins essay on the work o Nikolai Leskov, The Storyteller. The essay describes morethan the simple contrast between the storytelling memory o epicculture and the ractured, discontinuous memory o modernity. What is striking about this essay is its nostalgia or a world in whichboredom signi es the availability o time rather than its urgency.

The contrast is Baudelaires urban world, which alternates violently between the glancing moment o shock and the demand or a calmthat never arrives. In this other, older world boredom is not yet ennui,the splenetic restlessness that constantly eels the prod o time, but rather the symptom o having time. Benjamin ends that essay with are erence to FlaubertsSentimental Education , perhaps the nineteenthcenturys greatest single testament to the nihilism o ennui. What iscompelling about the essay is the ambiguity o its position. It hovers

over, or between, two extremes: nostalgia or a world where time wasstill available and recognition o the irreversible change in the natureo time that had arrived with modernity and commodity culture.

Nineteenth-century bourgeois culture solidi ed changes in the work ethos already underway. The east day is no longer the culmi-nating day, the day rom which others get their meaning, but rather,


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as Max Weber argues in his interpretation o the rise o capitalismand Dutch Protestant culture, the seventh day: that is, the day set

apart. This attitude rests o course upon a certain interpretation o Genesis that was thought to legitimize it. That cannot disguise theact, however, that underlying this same interpretation o Genesis is

an understanding o work and productivity as the normative measureo social worth and virtue.

In the world o managed time per ected by Taylor, estival time became,in a new sense o the word, an empty day on the calendar, a ree day where work ceases but nothing else happens. InLeisure: The Basis o Culture , Pieper reminds us that in the theological tradition, especially that o Judaism and Catholicism, the east day takes place so that cre-ation and the world are remembered as such in their ullness. This act o common remembrance lies at the root o celebration, or holiday.More than the last day o the week, the east day was, as the day o leisure, the day that opened time, not simply a day that temporarily brought workday obligations to a halt. Arguing rom a point o viewthat is still instructive or its traditionalist perspective, Pieper showsthat the signi cance o the sacred holiday lay in the way that its cel-ebration lent to the rhythm o daily li e the infection o eternity. Ininterrupting work and daily routines the holiday did not merely giverespite. In giving respite, it was meant to recollect a time and a way o being more abiding than the time o the workday. This, however,is a view o the holiday that is altogether di erent rom its meaningin modern societies as the temporary surcease o work, hence as thetime allowed or what are now called leisure activities. Precisely to

the extent that these leisure activities are subordinate to the clocko the workplace, the meaning as well as the unction o the holiday remains thoroughly mundane. For someone like Pieper, however, it was patently clear that the holiday did not represent exceptional but rather normative time. The holiday is not simply the respite romthe ordinary weekday but rather, as a respite, the opening in whichordinary time rst has its temporal essence discovered.

To identi y the plenary temporality o the holiday as the time that

Leopardis and Baudelaires works mourn is not to identi y them,against their own designs and intentions, as traditionalists. It is,though, to identi y one respect in which an element o tradition survives under the mutated orm o loss and mourning. In their universethere is no continuity between the present moment and the uture;there is only the in requent ecstatic rupture, in which the in nite is


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no longer distinguishable rom nothingness, as in Leopardis great idyll o that name, or there is the vacant sameness o noia, or ennui.

Pieper, indeed, adduces Baudelaire as a perverse kind o authority onmodernitys idolatrous attitude toward work as an end in itsel : Thereis an entry in Baudelaires Journal Intime that is ear ul in the preci-sion o its cynicism: One must work, i not rom taste, then at least

rom despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is lessboring than pleasure (Pieper 59).23 In the section o the Journaux Intimes headed Hygine, Baudelaire identi es time as the source o this single truth: At every minute we are wracked by the idea andthe sensation o time. There are only two means o escaping thisnightmare,o orgetting: pleasure or work. Pleasure wastes us. Work

orti es. Let us choose [A chaque minute nous sommes crass parlide et la sensation du temps. Et il ny a que deux moyens pourchapper ce cauchemar,pout loublier: Le plaisir et le travail. Leplaisir nous use. Le travail nous orti e. Choisissons]. These wordscapture not simply the mordancy o Baudelaires attitude but the posi-tive nihilism in his conception o time. The idea that time has to bespent, whether in work or pleasure, exceeds even the most relentlessProtestant work ethic. The prospect o a time that one can simply let be in its temporal passing is oreign to Baudelaire. The nearest hecomes to that is in a poem like Accueillement, though there, too,the contemplative ease is shot through with melancholy resignation. And nevertheless in Baudelaires impatience, in his wish, as Benjaminsays, to bring the course o the world to a halt, there is a demand orthe impossible, or the totally ul lled and ul lling moment.24

Gadamer, like Pieper, derives the meaning o the estival day, rest,

and leisure rom the Greek philosophical conception o theoria .Gadamer points out that [t]heoros means someone who takes part in a delegation to a estival. Such a person has no other distinctionor unction than to be there. Thus the theoros is a spectator in theproper sense o the word. . . .25 This idea in orms the meaning o Greektheoria , which not incidentally has a meaning altogether di er-ent rom the present use o the word in elds like literary and culturalstudies to denote any ormalized interpretive program. Indeed, the

contemporary use o the word corresponds quite closely to Piepersde nition o modern philosophy as intellectual labor. Gadamerremarks by contrast that Greektheoria is not to be conceived primar-ily as subjective conduct, as a sel -determination o the subject, but in terms o what it is contemplating. Theoria is a true participation,not something active but something passive (pathos), namely being


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totally involved in, carried away by what one sees (Gadamer 12425).Gadamers ramework or discussing the temporality o estival is the

play element in aesthetic experience. His intention is to reestablishthrough play the ontological link between the experience o art andthe experience o ritual. It is this which leads Gadamer to a moreradical concept o temporality than that o historical succession. Foraccording to the logic o historical succession, the estival or holiday is a sel -same thing which originates in a certain way and then under-goes changes through time. Gadamer does not deny o course that events take such a course, but his aim is to discern a more radicalkind o temporality, or duration, in the celebration o estival. Froman ontological point o view the estival is always something di erent,even when, as Gadamer adds, it is always celebrated in the same way.In this context Gadamer re ers to a passage rom PlatosParmenides , where Socrates observes that it is in the nature o the day that it isthe parousia o something that remains thesame , despite the act that the day is everywhere di erent (123, n. 225).

What Gadamer says about the estival goes to the heart o what,in a metacritical sense, in missing rom Leopardis and Baudelairespoetry. For he characterizes the distinction o estival time as its totalmediation: the very experience that removes the spectator o the

estival rom himsel , namely, the absorption in the estival or event,at the same time gives him back the whole o his being (128). Inrealizing this kind o temporality the estival gives us a clue to thepeculiar historicity o works o art: they present something which ispalpably past but in such a way that it is always new. Benjamin, on theother hand, speaking rom the vantage point o commodity culture

in hisArcades Project , observes that both allegory and art or arts sakerenounce the idea o a harmonic totality in which art and pro aneexistence interpenetrate [einander durchdringen] (PW 416).

With this the parameters o the remainder o my discussion aredrawn. Gadamers interpretation o the east day represents a late version o the Hegelian argument or the redemption o the holiday in the world o everyday work and culture. Leopardi and Baudelaire,however, present two experiences o time in which it is the impossibil-

ity o a mediated return that now de nes history.

Leopardi and Baudelaire

The mood o idle waiting conventionally, and rightly, connected withthe poetry o Leopardi and Baudelaire is not purely the refection o a


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subjective attitude o world-denial but is rather a historical complex.26 It is tied to the modern orm o melancholy discerned by Benjamin

in the habit o collecting, especially the collecting o things that havebeen abandoned and wrenched out o any relation to the world. It is thus also related to the act, observed later by Simmel, that themetropolitan world o the present, while becoming more densely layered, has also lost its relation to the past. Idle waiting embracesboth the restless anxiety o Baudelaire and Leopardis melancholy knowledge that an expectations pleasure consists entirely in its neverbeing ul lled. That is the theme o the late idyll Il sabato del villag-gio (The Village Saturday). The contemplation o the east day asa day set apart lends it, even as it draws near, the aura o somethingdistant and alluring. Baudelaires boredom is restless and tormentedbecause it is the boredom o urban time. Benjamin calls it splenetictime, where every second is marked by a hyperacute awareness o itspassing (Illuminations 184;GS I 642). Leopardi, on the other hand,recalls a time we associate with provincial li e in small towns, with

estivals on town squares and the ringing o church bells. This is timenot yet subject to the atomization o urban li e, to its psychologizationas an internal theatre o consciousness like that described by Benjaminin Louis Philippe, or the Interior (see the discussion o Baudelairebelow). In Il sabato del villaggio Leopardi recalls that time as adetached yet a ected spectator, as someone who participates in what he contemplates over an unbridgeable internal distance.

One o the meditations in Leopardis collection o aphorisms, the Pensieri , is dedicated to the role anniversaries play in personal memory.The meditation is based on two entries in Leopardis notebooks, the

Zibaldone .27

I quote the text rom thePensieri in its entirety:How dear and lovely an illusion is that by which the anniversaries o an

event seem to have a substantial connection to it although they really havenothing more to do with it than any other day o the year. It is as i animage o the past arose and came be ore us on those days, tempering thesad thought o the annihilation o that which was, soothing the pain o theloss, and making that which is past and can never return again seem not completely lost or aded. When we nd ourselves in places where thingshave happened, memorable in themselves or only or us, and say, here thishappened and here this, we think ourselves in a way closer to those eventsthan elsewhere; similarly, when we say, Its now a year, or several years, sincethis or that happened, the thing appears, so to speak, more present or lesspast than on other days. And such imagining is so rooted in man that it ishard or him to believe that an anniversary is as distant rom the thing asany other day. Thus the yearly celebration o important memories, religious


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and civil, public and private, the birth and death days o beloved persons,and so on, is and was common in all nations which have or had memories

and records. And I have noted in asking people about this that sensitivemen accustomed to solitude or to sel -communion are usually extremely attentive to anniversaries, and they live, so to speak, on memories o that kind, always mulling them over and saying to themselves: In that year, onthat day like this one, this happened to me. (Pensieri XIII)28

I the notebooks discuss anniversaries as the institution o publiceasts and thus as a practice that still survived, albeit in attenuatedorm, in the orm o Church holidays, in the text rom thePensieri

the observance o anniversaries has become purely an act o interiorsel -communion. It is the public, ritual observance o anniversaries that has vanished. By contrast with Gadamers understanding o estival, which marks the return o the same within di erence, Leopardismeditation underscores memorys insularity. Memorys restriction toits own container, its adherence to the skin o its own consciousness asit were, is its pathos. The di erence rom the estival time describedby Gadamer, where repetition is an ontologically novel return, couldnot be greater. For Leopardis text rom thePensieri describes theaction o a memory that recalls a commemorative rite while at thesame time registering its own incapacity to ul ll that rite in the pres-ent. On the one hand Leopardis text a rms the Hegelian-Protestant understanding o the commemorative east as an internalized past,or erinnertes Leben. But on the other hand Leopardian memory is riven by a melancholy awareness o an insuperable gap dividing it

rom the thing commemorated.The east day as empty memorial, as recollection o a time that will

not return or will never arrive, is the subject o two Leopardi idylls,La sera del d di esta (Sunday Evening) [1820] and Il sabatodel villaggio (The Village Saturday) [1829]. The ormer, earlieridyll is the more conventionally nostalgic. Having sounded with a

amiliar note o pathos the moti o mutability in vv. 2930cometutto al mondo passa, / e quasi orma non lascia [how everythingin the world passes, / hardly leaving a trace]the poem rises in itsconclusion to a remarkably pure and detached representation o theupsurge o sadness that accompanies the end o the holiday. It doesthat by registering the stillness o the holiday evening as an epochalsilence and then setting against it the sound o a workmans song dyingaway along the back streets o the town. In this way Leopardi takes adetachable idyllic image o the past, which obviously has a personalinfection, and raises it up into a elt historical picture.


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Tutto pace e silenzio, e tutto posaIl mondo, e pi di lor non si ragiona.

Nella prima et, quando saspettaBramosamente il d estivo, or posciaChegli era spento, io doloroso, in veglia,Premea le piume; ed alla tarda notteUn canto che sudia per li sentieriLontanando morire a poco a poco,Gi similmente si stringeva il core.

(vv. 3846)

[ (...) AllIs peace, all quiet, the whole world still, And they are spoken o no more. When I was a child, I used to wait In a ever o desire or Sunday, And when it was over Id lie awakeBrokenhearted, sobbing to my pillow; And then, in the small hours, a songId hear dying away little by little

Through the back streets o town Would make my heart ache as its aching now.]29

In his notebook Leopardi requently observes that pleasure is only to be had rom contemplation o the past or anticipation o the uture,never rom the present: Il piacere umano . . . si pu dire ch sempre

uturo, non se non uturo, consiste solamente nel uturo. Lattoproprio del piacere non si d. Io spero un piacere; e questa speranzain moltissimi casi si chiama piacere [One can say that human plea-sure always lies in the uture, that it never exists except in the uture.Pleasure as such is not to be had. I anticipate a pleasure, and thisanticipation is what in most cases is called pleasure] (Zibaldone 532).30 For this reason the in nite in Leopardi has or eited everything o theChristian sense o eternity as plenary time. The in nite is instead the void over which past and uture time hover; always tending toward it,they inevitably ounder upon it. Hence the melancholy wisdom o thepenultimate strophe in The Village Saturday:

Questo di sette il pi gradito giornoPien di speme e di gioia:Diman tristezza e noiaRecheran lore, ed al travaglio usatoCiascuno in suo pensier ar ritorno.

(vv. 3842)


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[O all the seven days in the weekThis one gets the warmest welcome,

Full o hope, as it is, and joy.Tomorrow the hours will be leaden With emptiness and melancholy,Everybody going back in his mindTo his usual travail.]

(Selected Poems 55, translation altered)

The holiday is there ore not a memorial to something that everactually existed but a memorial to a non-existent. The estival day, in

Gadamers ontological sense o the parousia that is everywhere di -erent, never arrives.31 For Leopardi the non-existent is the uniquetemporal mani estation o the in nite. In an entry o theZibaldone rom1826, that is, rom the time between the two holiday idylls, Leopardi writes that the in nite is a ruit o our imagination [parto dellarostra immaginazione], which is to say, a negation o the real, a thing without analogy in nature (Zibaldone 4178; c . 4142).

A number o Baudelaire texts represent the pro ane quality o urbanexistence masquerading as the promise o a regained paradisal exis-tence. Baudelaires phrase arti cial paradises, indeed, is one o thenineteenth centurys most memorable phrases or the sham utopia, orbeatitude, promised by commodity culture. In Spleen et Ideal and theTableaux Parisians, however, the illusion-making capacity o urbanexistence that is repeatedly displayed is also immediately punctured.Lhorloge (The Clock), the concluding poem o Spleen et Ideal,de nes the pro ane time o the city as idle, meaningless succession:Horloge! dieu sinistre, e rayant, impassible, / Dont le doigt nousmenace et nous dit: Souviens-toi! [Clock! Sinister god, impassive,earsome, / Whose nger threatens us, who calls out Remember!].Benjamin remarked that the decisive thing about this poem is that time is empty (GS I 1141).32 The same inescapable urgency o empty time in orms two texts romLe Spleen de Paris , La chambre double(The Double Room) and A Une heure du matin (At One OClockin the Morning).

In section our o Paris, Capital o the Nineteenth Century, which

bears the heading Louis-Philippe, or the Interior, Benjamin locatesthe beginning o the divorce between work place and private livingspace in the bourgeois interior:

For the private person, living space becomes, or the rst time, antitheticalto the place o work. The ormer is constituted by the interior; the o ce isits complement. The private person who squares his accounts with reality


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in his o ce demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions. Thisneed is all the more pressing since he has no intention o extending his

commercial considerations into social ones. In shaping his private envi-ronment he represses both. From this spring the phantasmagorias o theinterior. For the private individual the private environment represents theuniverse. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room isa box in the world theatre. (Refections 154;PW 52)

This private person both is and is not the persona o Baudelairespoet. For whereas the private interior o Louis-Philippe is sealed o

rom the world outside, the wind o the street blows into the interior

spaces o the prose poems. At OClock in the Morning expresses andthe undercuts the wish or a time totally absolved rom the external world. Benjamin writes: Baudelaires deepest wish was to interrupt the course o the world (PW 401). The sly sel -irony with which thespeaker notes that a double turn o the key seems to augment hissolitude is a su cient indication o his di erence rom the bourgeoiscitizen. The world o BaudelairesSpleen is morally riven by the dismay-ing awareness o its own ragility. The lacerated sel -consciousness o At One OClock in the Morning impales itsel on the illusion that its mordant sel -irony salvages in some way its mortal discontent. It does not, just as the poems sel -communing in the silence o thenocturnal hour is not repose. Baudelaire does not need to make any mention o holiday or estal time or it to emerge as the works nega-tive background.

The doubleness o The Double Room consists in the contrast it draws between the grim actual realities o the artists li e and thephantasmagoric paradise he evokes in drug-induced reveries. That contrast is etched in the sordid, disconsolate image o the patternsdrawn by the rain on the rooms windowpane: les tristes entres ola pluie a trac des sillons dans la poussire [sad windows wherethe rain has drawn urrows in the dirt]. The e cacy o the imagelies in its working like a modern emblem, or Sinnbild: it expressesin physical terms a moral story, or ate. So much is evident rom thistext alone, but the point is rein orced by the knowledge that windowshave a special status in Baudelaires poetry. The window is, on the one

hand, the portal to a larger horizon o experience and sensation, as inthe amous Voyage that concludes Les Fleurs du Mal (Au ond delInconnu pour trouver dunouveau ! [To the bottom o the Unknownin order to nd somethingnew !]). But in poems XXVI and XXXV o Paris Spleen, Les Yeux des Pauvres (The Eyes o the Poor) andFentres (Windows), windows are transparent walls inviting a kind


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o voyeurism even as they rein orce a sense o exclusion. Perhapsthe most un orgiving expression o the alse promise o windows is

in The Abyss where Baudelaire gives a wholly negative infectionto in nity: Je ne vois quin ni par toutes les entres [I see only in nity through every window]. In The Double Room, the detailo the window, mortal reminder o the existence o an outside world,only appears at the end o the poem with the de nitive puncturing o the speakers illusion. Up to that point the room had been, like theLouis-Philippe interior, a windowless theatre. The windows suddenappearance signi es the reappearance o pro ane time.33

The poem ends with a vision o time as a death sentence. Indeedits penultimate paragraph gives a wrenching, ironic twist to the Bib-lical moti o chairos , the vertical time distinct romchronos that inbreaking open history also gives it another dimension. Baudelaire,too, announces the advent o a single decisive moment, but the truly Beckett-like irony o his announcement consists in the act that thedecisiveness o this moment lies in its sudden seizure-like awarenessthat the one time is the time o unrelieved, unvarying sameness. Ilny a quune Seconde dans la vie humaine qui ait mission dannoncerune bonne nouvelle, la bonne nouvelle qui cause chacun uneinexplicable peur. [There is only one Second in human li e whosemission it is to announce good news, the good news that arouses ineach an inexplicable ear.] This nihilistic reprise o the Augustiniannunc stans , or eternal moment, is the counterpart to the paragraphexactly hal way through the poem where the abolition o time hadbeen delusively proclaimed: Non! il nest plus de minutes, il nest plus de secondes! le temps a disparu; cest lternit qui rgne, une

ternit de dlices! [No! there are no more minutes or seconds!time has vanished; now Eternity reigns, an eternity o delights!] Thisis a most extreme instance o Baudelaires ironic use o religious andtheological moti s: the goodness o this good news consists in itsbeing nothing more than a paralyzing experience o inexplicable

eara pointless experience, an experience without discernibleissue or direction.

But is this the case? What i the idolatrous character o art is more

than sham eternity? What i the prose poems attempt to escape timeis not a utile denial o time but just a ailed attempt to grasp time assuch, to lay hold o it? In this prose poem Baudelaire ironically char-acterizes arts ephemeral nature by suggesting that it has parallels tointoxication, either the intoxication o drug use or that o idolatry. But Baudelaires irony is not nally one-sided or entirely sel -impugning.


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The central gesture, or act, in The Double Room is that o layinghold o what is timeless. The timeless, however, is not something

atemporal but rather, as the everyday use o the word indicates, adimension o temporality itsel . For this reason Slavoj Zizek says, ina discussion remarkably illuminating or Baudelaire, that eternity isthe name or the event or cut that . . . opens up . . . temporality, asthe series/succession o ailed attempts to grasp it. The psychoanalyticname or this event/cut is . . . trauma.34 Trauma, though, as Zizekobserves, is precisely what cannot be temporalized or historicized.Trauma, then, is the experience never had as such in which the tem-poral and eternal are shown to be related, not opposed. From thispoint o view the seedy little psychological drama that Baudelaireun olds in The Double Room is much more than the sel -ironicpuncturing o an abject illusion.

Zizeks representation o trauma as the point o eternity intersectsnot only with Baudelaires texts but also with Walter Benjamins use o Baudelaire or the articulation o a non-evolutionary and non-utopian view o revolution. Somewhat oddly, Zizek does not make the connec-tion between his concept o trauma and Benjamins own concept o the redemptive Messianic now-time (Jetztzeit) that will bring history to a standstill, though he makes re erence to Benjamins Messianismseveral pages earlier (Zizek 8990). In any case, though, the idea that eternity is not the negation o time but rather the opening, or rent,in time that saves time rom the appearance o being mere succes-sionan immer so weiter, as Benjamin says o historicismis thesame idea that negatively in orms Baudelaires revolt. When, as I havenoted, Benjamin called Baudelaires wish to interrupt the course o the

world his deepest will he was naming Baudelaires restless discontent and escapism. But his statement also alludes to a kind o metaphysi-cal violence which is the only remaining way in which the opening o time, accomplished once in the holiday, can be simulated.

All o this is not to elevate the negativity o a Leopardi or Baudelaireto the status o an end in its own right. The trick to reading pessi-mistic writers like Leopardi, Baudelaire, or Benjamin is to lay ones

nger on the place where their negativity pulses with the thingthe

energy or desirethat is convertible into something positive. Not only the older criticism o Sartre but also the newer criticism o T. J.Clark or Eugene Holland reads Baudelaires negativity as nothing but a Marxist critique o commodity capitalism.35 Such a critique is not wrong but it is insu cient, because it does not and cannot do justiceto his poetic designs upon the object. As Giorgio Agamben says o


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Marx, the possibility o a relation to things that goes beyond boththe enjoyment o use-value and the accumulation o exchange value

escapes him.36

In spite o the widely held critical view that Baudelairehad little or no sympathy or religious ritual I would argue that pre-cisely on account o his devotion to the object there is a residue o the cultic in his poetry. Benjamin drew attention to it as the etishisticelement that Baudelaire the poet shared with the marketplace o histime. Typically, though, Benjamin noticed a sur ace analogy without spelling out dialectically the di erence the two levels o the analogy.Speaking rom the vantage point o a much later Marxism, Agamben isable to speak o something like poetic trans ormation in Baudelaireand to identi y it with a moment o ritual sacri ce in the poet:

As sacri ce restores to the sacred sphere what servile use has degraded andpro aned, so, through poetic trans guration, the object is pulled away both

rom its use and rom its value accumulation, and is restored to its originalstatus. For this reason Baudelaire saw a great analogy between poetic activity and sacri ce, between the man that sings and the man that sacri ces. . . As it is only through destruction that sacri ce consecrates, so it is only through the estrangement that makes it unattainable, and through the dis-solution o traditional intelligibility and authority, that the alsehood o thecommodity is changed into truth. This is the sense o art or arts sake, which means not the enjoyment o art or its own sake, but the destructiono art worked by art. (Stanzas 49)

This reading puts to rout both those who would de end Baudelaireon aestheticist grounds and those who would de end him as, in spiteo himsel , a socialist liberator and advocate o pleasure. Neither onenor the other, Baudelaire occupies a gap, a vacancy, in which thetheological repressed rises again. As Agamben suggests, though, thisis a theological presence uncoupled rom the traditional institutionalauthority.37

The Theological Remainder

The nal division o AdornosNegative Dialectics , Meditations on Meta-physics, contains a section entitled Happiness and Idle Waiting that

reads like a collective gloss on the chie modern texts dealing withennui, rom Goethes Werther to Leopardi, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard,Proust, and Beckett. Adorno writes: Idle waiting does not guarantee what we expect; it refects the condition measured by its denial. Theless o li e remains, the greater the temptation or our consciousnessto take the sparse and abrupt living remnants or the phenomenal


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absolute (375). In this brie passage Adorno succinctly states one o thechie temptations o the melancholic: to cling all the more tenaciously

to the ragmentary and momentary, the more de nitively it threatensto disappear into the past. And nevertheless Adorno continues, in anew paragraph, Even so, nothing could be experienced as truly alivei something that transcends li e were not promised also; no strainingo the concept leads beyond that. The transcendent is, and it is not. We despair o what is, and our despair spreads to the transcendentalideas that used to call a halt to despair. Adornos meditation vergeson articulating what he was loathe to admit: that the theological, likeart, shadows the margin o experience as its non-conceptual reserve.No concept being able to con rm that reserve, it is also true that noconcept will exhaust it.

It would be misleading to suggest that Baudelaires poetry knowsonly one time, that o urban shockthe discontinuity o interrupted,un ul llable desire. This is the ocular, spectatorial, envious desire by which the sel , the I o Baudelaires poetry, is marked. But alongsidethis sel is another, the remainder or memory o a childhood sel or whom time is not serial but enduring, even i lost or buried to thepoint o despair. Thus Adorno: What is a metaphysical experience?I we disdain projecting it upon allegedly primal religious experi-ences, we are most likely to visualize it as Proust did, in the happiness,

or instance, that is promised by village names like Applebachsville, Wind Gap, or Lords Valley. . . . To the child it is sel -evident that what delights him in his avorite village is ound only there, therealone and nowhere else. He is mistaken; but his mistake creates themodel o experience, o a concept that will end up as the concept

o the thing itsel , not as a poor projection rom things (373). Thisis the sel that knows pleasure as a remembered environment, as anatmosphere o happiness. In these remembered atmospheres time is

elt as durative, as lasting, in contrast to the violated, phantasmagorictime o The Double Room.

The childhood context evoked by Adorno is not ar rom that evokedby Benjamin in The Storyteller and by Bloch in his borrowing romHegel. Storytelling, according to Benjamin, depends on the cultiva-

tion o continuous experience (Er ahrung) and is opposed to thesingularity o isolated experiences (Erlebnis), but this ormer quality o experience and its time is what is disappearing:

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more e ectively thanthat chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And themore natural the process by which the storyteller oregoes psychological


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shading, the greater becomes the storys claim to a place in the memory o the listener . . . This process o assimilation, which takes place in depth,

requires a state o relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. I sleep is theapogee o physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee o mental relaxation.Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg o experience. A rustlingin the leaves drives him away. His nesting placesthe activities that areintimately associated with boredomare already extinct in the cities andare declining in the country as well. With this the gi t or listening is lost and the community o listeners disappears. (Illuminations 91;GS II 446)

In Benjamins treatment o Baudelaire, revolutionary time gets con-ceived in a radically temporal manner as the moment (Augenblick)that threatens to disappear with the passing o each present. For Ben- jamin, then, the revolutionary concept o the holiday survives in therestive discontent o Baudelaire as the destructive power to bring thefow o bourgeois progress to a stop. This is a radical secularization o the holiday: in traditional Catholic cultures the holiday is the recollec-tion o the essence o time as the eternal, and in bourgeois culture it is the hiatus rom the routine o work, but in revolutionary culture theholiday is an unheard o rupture: it brings the march o progress to astop. Benjamin notes that Baudelaires desire to interrupt the courseo the world was the source at once o his violence, impatience, andanger; and, he adds, the source o his ever renewed attempts to strikeat the worlds heart (or to sing it to sleep) (PW 667).38

When, in The Storyteller, Benjamin speaks o narratable experi-ence as Er ahrung in order to contrast it with Erlebnis, the mod-ern word or experience, he is actually setting a way to reintroducethe ormer under another name. In the essay On Some Moti s in

Baudelaire, Benjamin employs the word shock to emphasize thediscontinuous, radically momentary character o modern city experi-ence, a kind o experience alien to the world o Leskov. But discon-tinuity is not its unique value: shock experience is also shocking tothe extent that it is static. Trans xing experience, shock gives to it an image-like xity that it does not and cannot have otherwise. Itsstatic character there ore paradoxically re ers to the most feetingtemporality. Unlike the theological moment, the Augustiniannunc stans , it is not a glimpse into eternity but rather a glimpse o the pass-ing moment as the last glimpse o eternity. In the utterly contingent choice o a single moment to rescue, Benjamins shock experienceis the analog to the photographic attempt to seize time in its pureinstantaneity. But it is also related to the intention Benjamin ascribesto the revolutionary holiday: it absolutizes the passing moment, spring-


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ing it out o its mundane relation to be ore and a ter. Experience inthe nostalgic sense bespoken in The Storyteller is not disposed o

but rather displaced.The signi cance o the cultural constellation I have plotted resiststeleological representation, however quali ed. To this extent analy-ses like those o Weber and Simmel, or Kieran Flanagans recent attempt rom a Catholic perspective to salvage the theological, donot adequately capture the pro ound change in the nature o experi-ence in modern culture. By the same token Benjamins opposition o sacred and pro ane illumination also ails to measure up to historicalreality. But Benjamin seems to say as much himsel in his recourse toa vocabulary o redemption in the Theses on the Philosophy o His-tory. For what Benjamin understood is that the idea o redemptionis not the de eat o history and time but, ultimately, their a rmation.Only that which belongs to time merits and calls or redemption. Theopposite o redemption is not the mundane or worldly as such but,as E. M. Cioran puts it, the all rom time into a negative eternity,the peculiar mis ortune . . . o not being entitled to time.39 A wide-spread prejudice notwithstanding, the opposite o the plenum o sacred, estal time is not mundane, erial time but the timelessness o mere temporal succession. The persona o Paris Spleen and Benjamins wandering souls who have been dropped rom the calendar are sub- jected to time inasmuch as they have lost their entitlement to time. What Baudelaire called ennui and Leopardi noia is a double loss,the loss o both eternity and history. The image o eternity in their works is either unrelievedly empty and weary, a negative eternity, orit is the allure o something hopelessly remote. Contrary to what is

sometimes said about them, and about Romantic poetry in general,their speci c temporal consciousness is less a mourn ul contemplationo transience than the awareness o an unbridgeable separation romthat transience. Ciorans de nition o ennui as that unslaked nostalgia

or time, that impossibility o recapturing it and reinstating ourselves within it, that rustration o seeing time fow by up there, above ourmiseries says essentially the same thing (Cioran 18182).

The nostalgia represented by Leopardi and Baudelaire is not histori-

cal. Not tied to speci c time or place it is there ore a species o thepolitically discontented nostalgia that runs through the nineteenthcentury and into the twentieth. As an indeterminate nostalgia it isanarchic and anomalous, and to that extent a species o the internalsubjective world described by Simmel as a de ense against the increas-ing exactions and complexity o the objective, external world. Because


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it does not bear allegiance to a speci c cultural orm or institutiono the past this nostalgia will not be satis ed. This eature explains

the apparently conservative but in reality antinomian character o Baudelaires nostalgia. But this nostalgia also has another ace, that o the longing or happiness, or an atmosphere o repose, or simpleequilibrium o desire, that inhabits Leopardis poetry. More than asubjective escape rom the vulgarity and meanness o the societies they inhabited, the nostalgia o Leopardi and Baudelaire or the ul lledtime o the east day represents a demand or a non-mechanical,non-regulated time. At the risk o slipping into jargon, I would callit a post-secular time because it is a time beyond, or outside o , thesacred/secular dichotomy.

I have traced here the ironical historical inversion rom the Protestant-Hegelian paradigm o progressive internalization and trans ormationto the regressive paradigm o what I call the theological remainder.This remainder appears now not in the manner o grand metaphysicalsystems o belie , not in the manner o principles or ounding concepts,but rather, in the manner o ragments and images that persist in spiteo the collapse o concept and system. These ragments and imageshave a etish-like quality, using the word etish here not to re er toa psychosexual neurosis but to the elementary symbolic nature o the

etish as a sign or something that once was but has been lost or whichnever existed.40 Those two alternatives do not represent an ambiguity but rather, rom the point o view o cultural memory, an indiscern-ibility. My use o the word regressive, there ore, does not con orm toits usual meaning. I use the word here in a purely descriptive sense to

indicate the involuntary backward pull that a constellation o imagescan exercise upon thought and attention. I am suggesting, then, that this is exactly how the theological persists in Leopardi, Baudelaire,and Benjaminnot as a con ession or system but rather as a bound-ary o experience where the material remainders o the past reveal a

etish-like power even in a time when the cultural context in whichthey arose has withered. In Benjamin theological memory returns asthe depository or those images o the past which persist even in their

de eat. The potential objection to this line o thought is that it allowsor bad aith by promoting distorted images o the past. But this objec-tion misses the point. The lesson o nostalgia is not that nostalgia hasthe right to create the past that it wants but that in nostalgia, in itsinvoluntary backward pull, is a valid urge to save. Jacob Burckhardt already spoke o it as our un ul lled longing or what has perished


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(unsere uner llte Sehnsucht nach dem Untergegangenen).41 Thislonging does not translate, either in modernity or in our own post-

modernity, into the promise o uture redemption. Or it does so only in the orm o what Zizek calls trauma and Benjamin a standstill: thesudden, miraculous cessation o all happening. Only in this privative way does the theological persist or us.

We pay a price or the privative status o redemption, or the notionthat the only ul lled time is a time inde nitely de erred. In an essay called Toward an Understanding o the Messianic Idea, whichdates rom 1963, Gershom Scholem notes in his conclusion a cor-respondence in Judaism between the magnitude [Gre] o theidea and the endless weakness [unendliche Schwche] o Jewishhistory.42 Its consequence is what he calls the provisional charactero Jewish history, or the inevitable incompleteness o a li e lived inde erment [dasLeben im Au schub ] (Scholems emphasis). In thisdispensation the world o redeemed time, the time o tikkun , or the world restored to a harmonious condition, appears in nitely remote.For Benjamin, as or Scholem, history is the matrix in which thetheological has always disclosed itsel . That is a statement that, in anolder dispensation, might have served as a ormula or the ullness o revelation, its saturation o pro ane time. In the changed conditionso the present, though, it can only be understood negatively as thede ault o the theological.

This essay began with a re erence to Walter Benjamins image o the angel o history as a paradigmatic image or the marginal statuso theology in late modernity. I want to return to that image in orderto bring out what I think is its implicit theological importance. For

many, perhaps most, readers o Benjamin, the situation o the angelis that o the impotent witness to catastrophe. And in view o Benja-mins critique o modernity in theArcades Project as the catastrophe o progress, that reading is entirely correct. Yet this reading presupposesthat the situation o the angel is temporary, a situation ultimately tobe absolved by the rupture o revolution. But is it? What i the situa-tion o the angel is not an interval between two times but rather aninde nite and expanding interval, which, with time, acquires its own

dimensionality independent o past and uture? From this point o view the weakness that Scholem identi ed with Jewish history, witha li e lived in de erment, is no longer a speci cally Jewish weaknessbut the weakness o a present or which history has become such animmersion in inde nite waiting. This weakness is what Agamben callsthe di culty o ounding the present as the relationship between


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5 To this extent my understanding o the intellectual and cultural consequences o secularization is notably di erent rom that o Kieran Flanagan inThe Enchantment o Sociology: A Study o Theology and Culture (New York: St. Martins, 1996). Flanagandiscusses a number o the same themes and some o the same gures I do, andshares my view that Baudelaire is instructive on account o , not in spite o , histheological as well as sociological marginality. But Flanagan nally cannot surmount the anti-modernist view o secularization that continues to shadow theology, inparticular Catholic theology. Indeed, I would suggest, against Flanagan and withGianni Vattimo, that secularization is actually immanent to the Christian message.See Gianni Vattimo,A ter Christianity , tr. Luca DIsanto (New York: Columbia UP,2002).

6 Giorgio Agamben, The Melancholy Angel, inThe Man without Content , tr. Georgia Albert (Stan ord: Stan ord UP, 1999) 106.

7 In making re erence to Benjamins anarchic practice o quotation as a symptom o the rupture in the transmissibility o the past, Agamben re ers to Hannah Arendtsessay on Benjamin which serves as the introduction toIlluminations.In act it is Arendt hersel who perhaps rst made the connection between Benjamins practiceo quotation and the crisis in tradition: . . . he discovered that the transmissibility o the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place o its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and todeprive it o peace o mind, the mindless peace o complacency (Illuminations ,38).

8 This di culty cuts across the literature on Leopardi and Baudelaire. Benjaminsinterpretation is only the most signal instance o the attempt to give Baudelaires

anti-modern prejudices a political meaning o another kind. In the meantimea whole chapter o Baudelaire scholarship has been dedicated to showing that Baudelaire harbored, all along, revolutionary sentiments or, alternatively, that Baudelaires discontent, revolutionary or not, reveals under pressure a pro oundanti-semitism. In both cases the theological is merely instrumental to the expres-sion o the one or the other tendency. In my argument, however, Baudelairesresidual revolutionary attitude and his anti-semitism are signs o the theologicalde cit.

Something similar is true or Leopardi, albeit in a much di erent sense. Eversince Cesare Luporinis essay o the 1940s broke the Crocean opposition betweena poetic and a philosophical Leopardi, in which the ormer was naturally the pre-

erred term, Leopardi scholarship has had to come to terms with the paradoxical,not to say contradictory, nature o Leopardis progressivity. See Luporini,Leopardi progressivo , rev. ed. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993).

9 The problem crystallized in Baudelaire is, to borrow the title o a book by HansSedlmayr, the loss o the center (Verlust der Mitte ). Sedlmayrs book, however,is a symptom o the problem, not its solution. For Sedlmayr there was no doubt-ing the existence o a normative center: it was de ned or him by a synthesis o humanism and Roman Catholic theology and ritual. In a culture and economy where everything is measured but where the measure o what is appropriate orproportionate disappears, it becomes pronouncedly di cult to regret the absenceo measure without sounding reactionary or hopelessly nostalgic in the mannero Sedlmayr. His ideological prejudices notwithstanding, Sedlmayrs book is ullo acute art-critical insights. SeeVerlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg: Otto Mller Verlag, 1948).

10 Adorno is equally critical but characteristically allows or a subtler assessment o Bergson: the crass dichotomy o Bergsons two times does register the historicdichotomy between living experience and the objecti ed, repetitive labor process;


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technical achievements o Dutch art became an isolated eature o that arts ap-preciation. What Hegel meant by Farbenmagie, though, was no such isolated

unction.18 This strong sense in which Hegels aesthetic is content-based later in orms Theodor

AdornosAesthetic Theory.19 Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, January 28, 1863, inThe Letters o Karl Marx , tr.

Saul Padover (Englewood Cli s: 1979) 168. Cited by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum,History o the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders , tr. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago:U Chicago P, 1996) 8.

20 Resentment o the clock among workers was tied to instances o owners tamper-ing with clocks in order to exact unpaid labor rom workers. Dohrn-van Rossumreports that as late as 1907 workers in the Apulia region o Italy pooled money

or the purchase o a clock as a countercheck to the o cial actory clock (317).The sentimental antithesis in the realm o art is Jean-Franois Millets painting o 1859,The Angelus,which depicts eld workers pausing in their work to pray thetraditional Catholic prayer that commemorates the mystery o the incarnation.In its depiction o the workers as people joined at once to the French soil and totraditional French society, Millets painting is su used with nostalgia or a conti-nuity o li e and ritual that is mani estly absent. In nostalgically summoning that continuity, or wholeness o relation, the painting alsi es its own present, muchas Hegel said the Biedermeier painting o Germany alsi ed its present.

21 Jose Pieper,Leisure the Basis o Culture , tr. Alexander Dru (New York: RandomHouse, 1963) 54.

22 T. J. Clark,The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 18481851(London:Thames and Hudson, 1973) 168.

23 The passage is section X, #18 o Mon Coeur mis nu: Il aut travailler, sinonpar got, au moins par dsespoir, puisque, tout bien vri , travailler est moinsennuyeux que samuser. In Charles Baudelaire,Oeuvres completes , 2 vols., ed.Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

24 Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on Baudelaire, a work that gives notoriously scant notice to his poetry, judges this wish or the impossible to be the undamental badchoice in Baudelaires li e. Georges Bataille answered Sartres one-sided reading by pointing out that it gives no scope at all to the status o the impossible in poetry,though that is mani estly what so much o Baudelaires poetry is concerned with.See Jean-Paul Sartre,Baudelaire , tr. Martin Turnell (New York: New Directions,1950) and Georges Bataille,La littrature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

25 Hans-Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method , second, revised edition. tr. Joel Wein-sheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1996) 124.

26 I have taken the term idle waiting rom Adorno. I re er to his own use o theterm in the nal section o this essay.

27 Giacomo Leopardi,Tutte le Opere , ed. Walter Binni and Enrico Ghidetti (Florence:Sansoni Editore, 1988) II 143848.

28 The translation is taken romA Leopardi Reader , ed. and tr. Ottavio Mark Casale(Urbana: U Illinois P, 1981) 190.

29 Selected Poems , tr. Eamon Grennan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 7.30 SeeZibaldone 3746: Il piacere sempre passato o uturo, e non mai presente,

nel modo stesso che la elicit sempre altrui e non mai di nessuno, o semprecondizionata e non mai assoluta . . . . [Pleasure is always past or uture, andnever present, in the same way that happiness is always someone elses and neveranyones . . . .]


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31 Waiting or Godot is, in this sense, the nal terminus or the moti o the vacatedholiday.

32 Eugene Holland points out that Benjamins treatment o Baudelaires vulnerability,the exposition o the poets soul to shock experiences, and his distanced, ironicde ensiveness as continuous attitudes ails to distinguish between phases in thepoets work. One can accept this criticism and still observe that it does not a ect the heart o Benjamins discussion, that what Baudelaire sought, beyond his ownirony and to his own despair, was the moment o duration, the time that wouldnot simply be the equivalent o attrition.

33 The use o a rain-spattered window as the emblem or an experience o the worldas desperate enclosure also brings to mind Vincent van Goghs remarkable paint-ing rom 1889, now in The Philadelphia Museum o Art, entitled, simply,Rain . Asin Baudelaires poem one is suddenly thrust up against the pane o glass; there

is no window rame. Only the picture rame itsel delimits a view onto a world in which a dark rain alls on a harvested eld. For Benjamin the correlative in thetwentieth century was BretonsNadja, which he discussed in Surrealism: The Last Snapshot o the European Intelligentsia. According to that essay, Breton wasthe rst to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded,in the rst iron constructions, the rst actory buildings, the earliest photos, theobjects that have begun to be extinct . . . No one be ore these visionaries andaugurs perceived how destitutionnot only social but architectonic, the poverty o interiors, enslaved and enslaving objectscan be suddenly trans ormed intorevolutionary nihilism . . . Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everythingthat we have experienced on mourn ul railway journeys (railways are beginning toage), on God orsaken Sunday a ternoons in the proletarian quarters o the great cities, in the rst glance through the rain-blurred window o a new apartment, intorevolutionary experience, i not action. They bring the immense orces o atmo-sphere concealed in these things to the point o explosion. In Walter Benjamin,Refections , ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986)18182. In light o a passage like this it is not di cult to see how Baudelairesexperience gets endowed with revolutionary potential.

34 Slavoj Zizek,The Fragile Absoluteor Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For (London: Verso, 2000) 9596.

35 See Eugene Holland,Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics o Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).

36 Giorgio Agamben,Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture , tr. Ronald L.Martinez (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993) 48.

37 For Agamben, this situation is indicative o the precarious, border-line charactero poetry: the quest o modern poetry points in the direction o that disturbingregion where there are no longer either men or gods, where there is but a pres-ence, rising incomprehensibly over itsel like a primitive idol, at once sacred andmiserable, enchanting and terri ying, a presence that possesses at once the xedmateriality o a dead body and the phantasmatic elusiveness o a living one . . .it reveals and once again dissolves itsel in its own simulacrum o words until theprogram o alienation and knowledge, o redemption and dispossession . . . will

be accomplished (Stanzas 5051).38 The German text reads: Den Weltlau zu unterbrechendas war der tie ste Willein Baudelaire. Der Wille Josuas. . . . Aus diesem Willen entsprang seine Gewalt-ttigkeit, seine Ungeduld und sein Zorn; aus ihm entsprangen auch die immererneuten Versuche, der Welt ins Herz zu stoen (oder [sie] in Schla zu singen).This text is obviously related to the teenth o the Theses on the Philosophy o History, which begins, The awareness that they are about to make the continuum


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o history explode is characteristic o the revolutionary classes at moment o their action. That moment is the initial day o a calendar whose time is not that measured by clocks but rather a time where the same day that keeps recurringin the guise o holidays, which are days o remembrance. Benjamin concludesthe thesis with the citation o a revolutionary street rhyme in which new Joshuastook aim with their rifes at the clocks on towers in order to stop the day.

39 E. M. Cioran,The Fall into Time , tr. Richard Howard (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970)17374.

40 See Giorgio Agambens discussion o the etish inStanzas 3135.41 Jacob Burckhardt as quoted by Sieg ried Kracauer,History: The Last Things Be ore

the Last (New York: Ox ord UP, 1969) 77. The source is BurckhardtsWeltgeschich- tliche Betrachtungen in Burckhardt Gesamtausgabe , vol. VII (Stuttgart, Berlin, andLeipzig: 1929) 206. Burckhardt is exemplary in a way that allows Kracauer to dohim more justice than, say, Hayden Whites allotment o Burckhardt to the tropeo ironic pessimism inMetahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973). At the same time Kracauer sustainssome old prejudices, in particular by pitting Burckhardt against Hegel. The way in which Burckhardt is implicated in Hegel, not in spite o but on account o the kinds o criticisms he levels against him in the opening toWeltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen , has not been adequately explored.

42 Gershom Scholem, Toward an Understanding o the Messianic Idea, inThe Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality , tr. Michael Meyerand Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1971).

43 Ren Char, une Srnit Crispe (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1951). I quote thetext as it appeared with the translation by Brad ord Cook inBotteghe Oscure XXII(Autumn 1958): 9293.

the tehologica remainder in leopardi, baudelaire

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