Suffering and pain can make the living body an active agent.

Evidence

Although the living body is the object of sensations (and in that sense passive), its ability to suffer, to respond perceptually and emotionally to external and internal causes, to use its own pain in unique ways in particular social relationships, makes it active. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 435

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘active’ and ‘passive’ are meant here: passivity from being an object of sensation, activity from the capacity to use one’s own pain relationally.
• XREF: connects to: Illness makes the lived body appear as an object, a given substance.; Suffering inscribes a bodily knowledge that resists transmission from a distance. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 181