Embodiment is at the centre of phenomenology, which rejects the Cartesian separation between mind and body on which most traditional philosophical approaches are based. As we have seen phenomenologydisplaces both the Cartesian model of disembodied rationality,and the materialist model of bodies as machines.
Phenomenology explores our experiences as embodied actors interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience. The perceiver is not a pure thinker, but a body-subject, and any act of reflection is based on the bodily subjectivity of the lived body.
In our body we "integrate" our life-world, and our lives are "sedimented" in our body. Reflection and theories are understood as secondary orders in the life-world, like the relation between the landscape and its maps.
Does this not have affinities with the Adorno of Negative Dialectics, who writes:
"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept."