Time-distortion drugs imagined as prison sentences
example ·
retold in 3 talks
Scientists developing drugs to distort subjective time (minutes feel like years) immediately propose using them to make prison terms more 'efficient.' Žižek notes that nobody imagined using them to make love-making last longer, revealing the impoverishment of contemporary imagination.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“My immediate association was why not think about it in the opposite sense? Like you make love for five minutes you experience it like years.”
“I claim wouldn't it be a great loss for society to lose me for two years? So why wouldn't they just give me that drug”
“in reality society loses me for one day but I experience it as ten years.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
John Boorman1Richard Branson1Fernando Pessoa1Tom Hanks1Olga Kurylenko1Daniel Craig1Ang Lee Seifert1H. G. Wells1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Scientists developing drugs to distort subjective time (minutes feel like years) immediately propose using them to make prison terms more 'efficient.' Žižek notes that nobody imagined using them to make love-making last longer, revealing the impoverishment of contemporary imagination., illustrating political imagination decayed,ideology,super-ego culpabilization
1:41:16 XLII Sigmund Freud Lecture by Slavoj Žižek: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive2015 · 1:49:50
Scientists propose using a drug to make prisoners experience two years as one hour, paying their debt subjectively while remaining useful to society; Žižek finds this sad, noting his first thought was using it for sex., illustrating self-defeating hedonism
Scientists are developing pills that dilate subjective time so that one minute feels like a day; the thought experiment proposes letting a valuable criminal experience ten years of prison in one actual day, preserving social productivity., illustrating biogenetics and post-humanism,manipulation of inner experience,techno-Gnostic vision