The ordinary man survived God without too much difficulty and, rather, is today unexpectedly respectful of law and social conventions, instinctively inclined to abide by them, and, at least with respect to others, eager to invoke their implementation. It is as if the prophecy according to which ���if God is dead, then everything is permitted��� did not concern him in any way: he continues to live reasonably even without the comfort of religion and endures without resignation a life that has lost its metaphysical sense, a life about which he does not, after all, seem to have any illusions.

... he does not end the pathos that distinguished the two figures of the human after the death of god: Dostoevsky's underground man and Nietzsche's superman.

In each act of creation there is something that resists and opposes expression.

In the face of ability, which simply negates and abandons its potential not to play, and talent, which can only play, mastery preserves and implements in the act not its potentiality to play but the potentiality not to play.

��� mastery is not formal perfection but quite the opposite: it is the preservation of potentiality in the act, the salvation of imperfection in a perfect form.

Josephine sings with her impotentiality to sing ���

As Klee writes in a 1922 note, ���Creation lives as a genesis beneath the visible surface of the work���: potentiality, the creative principle is never exhausted by the actual work, but continues to live in it, and rather is ��� what is essential in the world���. For this, the creator can coincide with the work, find in it his only abode and his only happiness: ���A painting does not have specific ends; its only aim is to make us happy���.

Agamben,  The Fire and the Tale