Giorgio Agamben - Profanations

Now my charms are all oerthrown

And what strength I haves mine own.

Prospero to the audience in The Tempest

In Latin, Genius was the name used for the god who becomes each mans guardian at the moment of birth. The etymology is transparent and remains visible linguistically in the very proximity appearing between genius and generation. That Genius is related to generation is evident in any case due to the fact that in Latin, the genial object par excellence was the bed, the lectus genialis, because it is in bed that the act of generation is accomplished. Birthdays are sacred to Genius, and for that reason we still use the adjective genetliaco (birthday) in Italian. Despite the odious, now-inevitable Anglo-Saxon refrain, the presents and parties with which we celebrate birthdays are a memory of the feast and sacrifices offered to Genius by Roman families on birthdays. Horace speaks of pure wine, of a two-month-old piglet, of an immolated lamb, meaning one that is sprinkled with sauce for the sacrifice. It seems, though, that originally there was only incense, wine, and delicious honey cake, because Genius, the god who presides over birth, did not like blood sacrifices.

He is called my Genius, because he generated me (Genius meus nominatur, quia me genuit). But that is not all. Genius was not only the personification of sexual energy. Certainly, every man had his Genius and every woman her Juno, both of which manifested the fertility that generates and perpetuates life. But as the term ingenium that is, the sum of physical and moral qualities innate in the one who is born indicates, Genius was, in a certain way, the divinization of the person, the principle that governed and expressed his entire existence. For this reason, it was not the pubis but the forehead that was associated with Genius; the gesture of bringing the hand to the forehead which we enact almost without realizing it in moments of confusion and disorientation, when we seem almost to have forgotten ourselves recalls the ritual gesture of the cult of Genius (unde venerantes deum tangimus frontem). And since this god is, in a sense, what is most intimate and most our own, he must be placated and his favor maintained in every aspect and at every moment of life.

A Latin phrase perfectly expresses the secret relationship each person must maintain with his own Genius: indulgere genio. One must consent to Genius and abandon oneself to him; one must grant him everything he asks for, for his exigencies are our exigencies, his happiness our happiness. Even if his our! requirements seem unreasonable and capricious, it is best to accept them without argument. If in order to write you need he needs! a certain light yellow paper, a certain special pen, a certain dim light shining from the left, it is useless to tell yourself that just any pen will do, that any paper and any light will suffice. If life is not worth living without that light blue linen shirt (for goodness sake, not the white one with the collar of an office worker!), if without those long cigarettes with black paper you just dont see any reason to go on, then theres no point in repeating to yourself that these are no more than little manias, that now is the time to be over and done with them. In Latin, Genium suum defraudare, to defraud ones own genius, means to make ones life miserable, to cheat oneself, in Latin. But the life that turns away from death and responds without hesitation to the impetus of the genius that engendered it is called genialis, genial.

But this most intimate and personal god is also that which is most impersonal in us; it is the personalization of what, in us, goes beyond and exceeds us. Genius is our life not insofar as it was originated by us, but rather insofar as we originate from it. If it seems to be identified with us, it is only in order to reveal itself immediately afterward as more than us, and to show us that we are more and less than ourselves. Comprehending the conception of man implicit in Genius means understanding that man is not only an ego and an individual consciousness, but rather that from birth to death he is accompanied by an impersonal, preindividual element. Man is thus a single being with two phases; he is a being that results from the complex dialectic between a part that has yet to be individuated and lived and another part that is marked by fate and individual experience. But the impersonal, nonindividual part is not a past we have left behind once and for all and that we may eventually recall in memory; it is still present in us, still with us, near to us and inseparable from us, for both good and ill. Genius youthful face and long, fluttering wings signify that he does not know time, that we feel him quivering as closely within us as he did when we were children, breathing and beating in our feverish temples like an immemorial present. That is why a birthday cannot be the commemoration of a past day but, like every true celebration, must be an abolition of time the epiphany and presence of Genius. This inescapable presence prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity and shatters the egos pretension to be sufficient unto itself.

It has been said that spirituality is above all an awareness that the individuated being is not completely individuated but still contains a certain nonindividuated share of reality, which must be not only preserved but also respected and, in a way, even honored, as one honors ones debts. But Genius is not merely spirituality and is not just concerned with the things that we customarily regard as higher and more noble. Everything in us that is impersonal is genial. The force that pushes the blood through our veins or that plunges us into sleep, the unknown power in our body that gently regulates and distributes its warmth or that relaxes or contracts the fibers of our muscles that too is genial. It is Genius that we obscurely sense in the intimacy of our physiological life, in which what is most ones own is also strange and impersonal, and in which what is nearest somehow remains distant and escapes mastery. If we did not abandon ourselves to Genius, if we were only ego and consciousness, we would not even be able to urinate. Living with Genius means, in this sense, living in the intimacy of a strange being, remaining constantly in relation to a zone of nonconsciousness. But this zone of nonconsciousness is not repression; it does not shift or displace an experience from consciousness to the unconscious, where this experience would be sedimented as a troubling past, waiting to resurface in symptoms and neuroses. This intimacy with a zone of nonconsciousness is an everyday mystical practice, in which the ego, in a sort of special, joyous esoterism, looks on with a smile at its own undoing and, whether its a matter of digesting food or illuminating the mind, testifies incredulously to its own incessant dissolution and disappearance.