by
Yves Citton
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[...] 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.
earlier he talks about students being accused of not paying attention in school, but it's really that they just dont pay attention to what the teachers valorise & we should think about why
[...] The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in the world--in its dramatic as well as its quiet times--we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming.
[...] Mostly, they stood in it and drank cocktails. Sometimes they even had their burgers delivered to the pool. Fatou hated to watch her father crouching to hand a burger to a man waist-high in water.
In this sense, empathy isn’t just measured by checklist item 31—voiced empathy for my situation/problem—but by every item that gauges how thoroughly my experience has been imagined. Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child. All this is connected to her domestically stifled mother, in turn, and to her parents’ un-broken marriage; maybe everything traces its roots to her very first period, how it shamed and thrilled her.
I heard making this up as an accusation that I was inventing emotions I didn’t have, but I think he was suggesting I’d mistranslated emotions that were actually there, had been there for a while—that I was attaching long-standing feelings of need and insecurity to the particular event of this abortion; exaggerating what I felt in order to manipulate him into feeling bad. This accusation hurt not because it was entirely wrong but because it was partially right, and because it was leveled with such coldness. He was speaking something truthful about me in order to defend himself, not to make me feel better.
But there was truth behind it. He understood my pain as something actual and constructed at once. He got that it was necessarily both—that my feelings were also made of the way I spoke them. When he told me I was making things up, he didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling anything. He meant that feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction. I see all this, looking back.
I also see that he could have been gentler with me. We could have been gentler with each other.
Feeling Dave’s distance that day had made me realize how much I needed to feel he was as close to this pregnancy as I was—an impossible asymptote. But I thought he could at least bridge the gap between our days and bodies with a text. I told him so. Actually I probably sulked, waited for him to ask, and then told him so. Guessing your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, another boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning a few things, I think—that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialized kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once.
Julian has completed five hundred-mile races so far, as well as countless “short” ones, and I once asked him why he does it. He explained it like this: he wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn’t depend on external feedback. He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won’t constitute his sources of motivation. Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of twenty-five. It’s hard to say. Barkley doesn’t offer a pure form of this isolated drive, but it comes pretty close: when it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.
Why this sense of stakes and heroism? Of course I’ve been wondering the whole time: why do people do this, anyway? Whenever I pose the question directly, runners reply ironically: I’m a masochist: I need somewhere to put my craziness; type A from birth, etc. I begin to understand that joking about this question is not an evasion but rather an intrinsic part of answering it. Nobody has to answer this question seriously because they are already answering it seriously—with their bodies and their willpower and their pain. The body submits itself in earnest, in degradation and commitment, to what words can only speak of lightly. Maybe this is why so many ultrarunners are former addicts: they want to redeem the bodies they once punished, master the physical selves whose cravings they once served.