ABSTRACT
In contrast, Merleau-Ponty would have us see that the operations of our bodily agency are fundamentally cyclical, and so non-episodic in fundamental ways, with the result that our bodily agency is correlated to an experience of a time that is not so readily divisible into distinct moments. For Merleau-Ponty, natural time is most essentially grounded in a structure of indefinite repetition, and thus in a lack of meaningful differentiation and individuation among temporal moments. However, it is clear that for Merleau-Ponty some of our actions, in particular, those that most individuate us as agents, more clearly exemplify the basic structure of historical temporality than others. Within the existentialist tradition that Merleau-Ponty is clearly drawing from, these sorts of heightened decisions are the clearest cases of free action. To highlight the way in which an enduring practical orientation takes shape by way of the body's power to generalize, Merleau-Ponty frequently appeals to examples of repression drawn from psychoanalytic thought.
