How many times do we try in vain to remember a name that escapes us? Then we stop thinking about it, let ourselves be distracted, and the name arrives. Devoid for centuries from a cultural tradition that has privileged the dimensions of recollection and concentration, and still considered by medical and psychiatric knowledge to be an attention disorder, distraction is actually a fundamental component of our psychic life. This book rediscovers it as a practice of life and thought with a creative and subversive scope, but also as a way of looking capable of giving access to alternative forms of experience. As if it were a background noise to which sometimes it is good to listen.