ABSTRACT
Jed Rubenfeld referred, at the beginning of his book on Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government (Rubenfeld, 2001), to the opening scene of Milan Kundera’s Slowness, where a man replies to his wife’s question as to why Western Europeans, usually anxious for their safety, drive so fast on highways:
What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because [. . .] a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
