birthdays have been over-positivized in american culture as a landmark or a passive celebration, even maybe a righteous position to inhabit, like the birthday is the day in which you honor yourself by right to your own ego, which itself denies the act of creation itself, which in contemporary western culture is tied to deficit, rituals of self-sacrifice and loss of autonomy such as sleepless nights before an exam, or creative purges, singular events of creation over sustained effort, which through the guise of productivity is heralded as a consistent act of maintenance rather than generation.

this is where the paranoid trajectory correlating genius to ego emerges, following the understanding of genius away from dramaturgy and the creation of things indebted to the inexplicable insides of the generative complex, and into the idea of following it is a virtue which projects it outwards.

genius attains its more traditional reading as an origin-point when emerson uses it cosmologically with a capitalized "g", and affectively with a small case when relating to imagination as infinite consciousness possessing the individual.

however, identification itself, given it is regulatorily limited, often times is forced through enshittification to create its own standards of being, basically a practiced model of self-reinterpollation, or the blurring of actor-acted relations so that it can maintain its own logic through self-inference.

in that sense, what is monitored requests itself to be, what attempts to escape logics of capture intentionally obscures itself, but as a consequence of avoiding recognition its mediative quality, and therefore, influence, is substantially lowered in its stead.

in fact, it seems to me that for him it actually removes certain romantic aspects more characteristic of the virtues of genius that arent pretentious in nature, such that he creates a metaphor for genius as time, rumination, character, play, hiddeness and non-recognition, but never arrives to genius through its actual animating power, past the idea that its generative frequencies are both a cutthroat scaling of personification and a cosmological animation of origination instead of virtue-signalling psychologization.

no, to agamben it is the deepest essence, but then again, when it presents itself as a reflection, it loses its power of animation. agamben doesnt want it to be obscure but only mysterious and incapable of attaching to autonomy, which is fine on its own, although this also makes genius a de-cosmologified process in a sense.

the idea that the genius attaches to the figure of burdened confusion makes it poetic in novalis, but agamben stresses that the poetic connotation is one step divorced from the true drama genius encapsulates through originary quality.