Distraction is a state quite beyond control, which we can enjoy or feel threatened within.

Roland Barthes described the pleasures of distraction he found flitting between films, and in the darkness of the cinema during a film screening. He enjoyed a willingness to be ‘fascinated twice: by the image and by what surrounds it.’

The dream displeases me because one is entirely absorbed by it: the dream is monological; and the fantasy pleases me because it remains concomitant to the consciousness of reality (that of the place where I am); thus is created a double space, dislocated, spaced out…

Similarly, reading was enjoyed by André Gide as another doubling of consciousness - almost as a form of voyeurism: an attempt to penetrate another world in the knowledge that such attempts are doomed to failure. Martha Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge, describes the particular pleasure of this failure of control, with reference to Proust and ‘Albertine’s defiant, silent eyes [...] a secret world closed to [Marcel’s] will, a vast space his ambitious thoughts can never cover.’

If fantasy is distraction, is jealousy its ultimate form - masochism masked, secretly enjoyable?