Summary: | In this article I seek to highlight how Levinas’s understanding of time contributes to recover the value and meaning of the present moment, which has been underestimated in the philosophical tradition to this day insofar as it was conceived based on time, understood the latter as simple duration. I try therefore, hereby, to think of the meaning of the instant itself, as present, regardless of the functional meaning ascribed to it as part of a whole – the duration – in which it would be encompassed and absorbed. I try therefore to imagine another metaphor to explain the temporal occurrence, other than the point, the line or the flow of becoming; based on this metaphors, time have always been understood as a homogeneous continuous. This is, according to Levinas, an abstract representation of time itself where there is an order of the moments, but where does not actually exist the notion of a central moment: that moment par excellence that is the present.
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