Part of
Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and LinguisticsEdited by Natalie Depraz and Agnès Celle
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 11] 2019
► pp. 23–42
Surprise is commonly seen as a sudden instantaneous, intensively emotional, exclamative interjective, bodily startling “shock”. I would like to show that it would better be also understood as a processual dynamics, which presupposes a deep transformation of its commonly taken-for-granted experiential meaning as a shock. Such a dynamics unfolds along multifarious vectors, exemplarily time, emotion, cognition, language, inter-subjectivity and body. Since I already focused elsewhere on four of these vectors of the dynamics of surprise, namely time, emotion, cognition and language, I will deal here with the bodily time of surprise and reveal how the latter cannot be reduced to startle but refers to a multifaceted generative embodied process.