Traces of Endings: The Time of Last Things

Eschatology can be understood as the interpretation of signs of the last things; signs which are both textual and traced in the experience of ending and finitude. Such hermeneutical readings are ambiguous between hope of salvation and despair in the face of the end of the world. This paper attempts to mediate between the sense of hope and of despair through a phenomenological account of endings as contingent events, cutting across the projections of everyday life. Such a phenomenological hermeneutics of finitude and contingency will be shown to yield an understanding time as characterised by the momentary possibility of transformation in the hope in or despair of an originary source of sense.