Advice?

I'm looking for a little advice from our readers. Or from my co-bloggers. There's one chapter of my dissertation -- actually, the chapter that was the basis of my job talk at State U, in another lifetime -- which, in the massive revisions I ended up doing, I decided to drop from the book. It just no longer fit with the revised (and, I hope, now finally coherent) argument. I've held onto this piece for a while now, because although it isn't in the book, it's still obviously pretty close to the book, and I didn't want to give the appearance of publishing too much stuff from the book when I was shopping it around to various publishers. Now I've picked up that old chapter again, to see whether I can make an article out of it. I already did a quick polish on it. (It's amazing how your writing changes, with a few years: man, it read like crap when I looked at it again. I couldn't believe it: and I spent so much time on it, back in the day). The thing is, I sort of feel that its moment has passed. I think it's fine, as a reading of a certain play; I think it says something about that play that no one else has quite said before, and at that level, I still believe it. But I don't really care about the larger trajectory of the argument anymore, and I find it hard to believe that other people will care about it much, either: I just don't think it has any real intervention to make, now. Too much time has passed. So: do I try to publish it or just put it aside? (Maybe I'm kidding myself about making an "intervention" -- I'm not even sure what that word means, actually. I think I picked it up from one of my advisers in grad school).