Touching The Boundary Mark

Abstract

Th is paper explores the unique phenomenology of habit and temporality put forth in Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse. I situate her understanding of temporality in relation to her early work Pyrrhus and Cinéas. I extract her notion of a boundary marked future that decreases anticipation for the future and thus rigidifies habits (through an increased reliance on the past). In the final section I appropriate the notion of a boundary mark for a cultural phenomenology where we understand boundary marks as constituted by our understandings of ourselves in time and not through aging alone. This cultural boundary mark can be used to understand how societal prejudice operates at the level of lived temporality.