A Duration of Time

"In question in this course is, above all, time - this is a course on the duration of time." All ethics emerges out of time. Out of duration. Out of finity. Albeit Levinas wants us to refrain from referring time to the couple "being and nothingness", to the category, hence, of finity, which is the plane dividing being from nothingness, which, for lack of a better description, is being encircled by nothingness, it is to this finity, to this couple, that time (and duration) eventually resorts for a definition. Time hinges upon its separation from and antinomy to eternity for an interpretation. Though one of the most difficult hermeneutical concepts, time, unlike eternity, is comprehensible under certain constraints. It is, for instance, "patience." Eternity, whereas, is infinity and sheer incomprehensibility. "As temporalization - zeitigung - the word duration avoids (all these) misundertandings and avoids the confusion between what flows within time and time itself." In the fact of this avoidance of confusion, lies the possibility of an interpretation of time - that confusion is avoided and a pre-understanding of authentic time reached. Time (and duration) is hermeneutical because of finity, because it is not eternal, infinite and incomprehensible, "whose signification should perhaps not be referred to the couple "being and nothingness," understood as the ultimate reference of meaning, of everything meaningful and everything thought, of everything human - death is the point from which time takes all its patience; this patience that escapes its own intentionality qua expectation; this "patience and length of time," as the proverb says, where patience is like the emphasis of passivity. Whence the direction of this course: death understood as the patience of time."