“You Shouldn’t Try to Be What You Can’t Be”: How Wonder Frees Embodied Agency

Abstract

The paper presents the agency of human beings as embodied, i.e. it shows what it means to think about agency as founded on being a body (rather than merely exercised through a body). It is also argued that the free—i.e. reflective and spontaneous—exercise of agency should likewise be understood as embodied. The paper argues that both the appreciation and experience of the free exercise of embodied agency require wonder. The latter is defined as the attitude that facilitates the relationship of familiarization without appropriation. The paper shows how wonder contributes to the experience of freedom related to expressing one’s own unchosen (bodily) difference while relating to the differences of others.