Abstract

Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece Flights highlights one of the most profound metaphysical, moral and religious conundrums – a tension, but also an intimate bond, between stability and structuredness, on the one hand, and the power of change, movement and transgression on the other. The paper is devoted to unveiling what I dub the paradox of embodied agency. In simple terms, structuredness makes the known world organized and predictable; yet, at the same time, these very structures are vehicles of change, movement, sometimes even destruction. I make the case that this profound aspect of Flights deserves more recognition.