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

Summary/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. refl ective and spon-taneous—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 defi ned as the attitude that facilitates the re-lationship of familiarization without appropriation. The paper shows how wonder contributes to the experience of freedom related to expressing one’s own unchosen (bodily) diff erence while relating to the diff erences of others.

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