• Berlant explores how attachments (and therefore attention) to certain objects or ideals can be simultaneously life-sustaining and injurious.

• Why it matters: This directly challenges metaphysical ideas of capacity as purely enabling. Attention is not neutral or purely productive—it’s ambivalent, affective, and structured by power.

• Key passage:

  “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to something that actually hinders the possibility of flourishing.”
  (p. 1)

• Connection to Conway: This is a clear example of how attention can be a technology of governance and exclusion, not simply a free capacity or ethical stance.

---

• What it offers: Berlant analyzes how affect and sentiment shape public life and political belonging.

• Why it matters: Attention here is entangled with normative narratives and political structures, revealing how some bodies and experiences are privileged or afflicted and made ill.

• Key passage:

  “Affect is a set of relational capacities that are historical and political rather than simply personal or individual.”
  (p. 12)

• Connection to Conway: Attention is a relational capacity, deeply embedded in historical structures, reinforcing his critique of metaphysics as historically conditioned strategies of domination.

---

• Berlant discusses how chronic exposure to structural violences shapes affective experience and attentional patterns.

• Why it matters: This moves beyond the individual and focuses on how systemic harms affect attention—producing fatigue, withdrawal, or forced vigilance.

• Key passage:

  “The problem of slow death is that it is both structural and felt, a condition in which agency and nonagency blend in ways that complicate the usual political categories.”
  (p. 284)

• Connection to Conway: Aligns with his insistence that metaphysics is not abstract but a material war on aberrance, including affective and attentional regimes that police life and death.

---

• Berlant explores how official narratives and attention shape collective memory and political legitimacy.

• Why it matters: Shows how attention is selectively organized to reinforce power, exclude certain histories, and produce what counts as “real.”

• Key passage:

  “Who and what we attend to is the beginning of political life, the site where power is enacted and contested.”

• Connection to Conway: This sharpens the idea that attention is not innocent—it’s a primary modality of biopolitical control, precisely what Conway links to metaphysical eugenics.

---

• 
  Berlant provides conceptual tools to see attention not as a neutral, universal capacity, but as a lived, political, and affective process.

• This complements Conway’s genealogical critique by situating metaphysical violence in the everyday experiences of attachment, loss, and normative demand.

• It offers a vocabulary to analyze how attention can be both weaponized and resisted, which is key if you want to move beyond abstract critique toward practical ethical-political thought.