Anterior origins: Merleau-ponty and the archaeology of the body

We tend to think of our bodies as not only existing in the here and now, but also being irreducibly alive. How are we alive? One way is to think of ourselves as belonging to the living present. All around us, time converges on our bodies, and through our experience of the world, we regard the body as both a spatial and temporal centre. We are the centre of things, full of the plenitude of time. At the other end of the living spectrum, we know that our bodies will die, and that the materiality of our existence will therefore cease to be. If we know this in advance, we nevertheless are only able to have a relationship with death from the perspective of the living present. However much we look at death, therefore, it still comes from a future that is legitimised in the present, as an event in the unmapped future.