[...]
"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.
[...]
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 ego's 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 one's 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 one's
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 it's a matter of digesting food or illuminating the mind, testifies incredulously to its own incessant
dissolution and disappearance. Genius is our life insofar as it
does not belong to us.
We must therefore consider the subject as a force field of tensions whose antithetical poles are Genius and Ego. This field is traversed by two conjoined but opposed forces: one that moves from the individual to the impersonal and another that moves from the impersonal to the individual. The two forces coexist, intersect, separate, but can neither emancipate themselves completely from each other nor identify with each other perfectly.
Giorgio Agamben Profanations (2007) pp9-13