This article explores the role of bodily failure in shaping our ethical outlooks in adventure sports. Drawing on ethnographic research with white-water kayakers, it shows how the experiences of lost bodily composure and containment alter our relationship to the self by revealing its limits of control. Building on insights from anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy, the article argues that such bodily failure enables an ethical self that is not contingent on external comparison but on an acceptance of the self’s impotentiality as defined by Giorgio Agamben. This in turn enables a self-centred humility that becomes the basis for ethical dispositions. By foregrounding the body’s role in ethical becoming, this article contributes to debates in anthropology and social theory on the intersections of corporeality, ethics, and subjectivity.
Beata Świtek (Sun,) studied this question.