Organisms aren't just surviving, they are living. Surviving and living rely on the ability of metabolism to provide energy when organisms interact with their environment and sometimes this energy enables organisms to modify their surroundings, and even to be modified in return by them. However, if surviving is centered on self-maintenance, which is based on the balance between endergonic and exergonic processes, the decoupling between metabolism and the agential capacities appears to be, in autonomy theory, as a key feature of every organism. Indeed, agency seems to be enabled by the metabolism and yet, its effects are not necessarily functional for the metabolism itself and, on the contrary, sometimes they can even be harmful for it. In this talk, we aim at clarifying the problem of the complex relations between metabolism and agency, rather than providing a definitive solution to it. Our background hypothesis consists in assuming that the theoretical characterization of an organism realizing a closure of constraints, and achieving thereby intrinsic purposiveness through self-maintenance faces a major challenge. Indeed, the conceptual tools that are at play in describing the survival of an organism as self-maintenance (notably norm, natural purpose, and agency) seem limited when applied to more complex interactive capacities, that is to say, to life, a relation with the world which puts under pressure the circular determination of autonomy. In this presentation, we will attempt to clarify the philosophical and theoretical challenges and difficulties raised by the transition from self-maintenance to agential capacities decoupled from metabolism, also by discussing recent work on cognitive autonomy. We will also explore to what extent decoupled and more complex forms of agency may contribute in a different way to the evolution of organisms.