[...] the effects of diffraction and polysemy peculiar to linguistic signifiers, so as to find as signification in the text that exceeds both what the author wanted to put there and what readers believed they had found as they sought to reconstitute the author's intentions. Indeed, in contrast to historical analysis, LITERARY INTERPRETATION is distinguished by an effort to make oneself attentive to what signs can say, beyond what the author may have wanted to say. The most obvious meaning does not require interpretation. The hidden dimension of what motivated or caused the use of words is the resource of historical enquiry, which helps us to grasp the complexity of the linguistic, ethical and political choices made by authors. Our relation to the literature of the past and present (and to art more generally) is, however, overdetermined by a whole series of resonances situated beyond the obvious meaning and before the (conscious or unconscious) intentions that produced the work. It is attention to this beyond and before which is the specificity of literary listening. [...]

Like sport, like music, attentional effort is first of all worthwhile for its individuation effects. The most important thing that it produces is not simply the possibility of pursuing the individuation of our being (helping us to avoid external threats of destruction), but, above all, the concrete realization of this individuation. To take up the vocabulary that Bernard Stiegler borrows from the Heideggerian tradition, attention does not only allow us to secure our 'subsistence' by avoiding death, and our 'existence' by bringing about the emergence of a unique and unprecedented life form through us; but, above all, it enables us to acquire a greater 'consistence' within the relationships that are woven in us. Far from helping us only to continue in being, it enables us to become ourselves.

If being distracted is in no way equivalent to not being attentive, but simply being being attentive to something else, then we can better understand why attentional problems problems are often described simultaneously in terms of deficit and hyperactivity. It seems paradoxical: either there is a lack or an excess. We might think we can resolve the problem by situating the paradox in a temporal succession: at one moment the child is inattentive, and, the next, over-attentive. But the truth is more complex, and more interesting: the child is both not attentive enough to the echoes that we would like him to repeat and excessively attentive to other echoes from which we would like to distract him.