YouSaid · the spoken record

Lea Ypi

lines on the record: 49
first: 2022-01-14
most recent: 2022-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And all these debates around reform and revolution, which I'd like to talk about hopefully maybe using again same sort of literary techniques.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I'm thinking about both a prequel and a sequel. So the sequel, if I do one sequel, it will be called equal. And so there will be a free and unequal and equal will be about my part in Italy and my experience as an immigrant of a kind of upper class Albanian family being an immigrant in Italy and my experience is of poverty and oppression fighting for scholarships and stuff like that. But I think, but maybe what I will do next is actually a prequel which will be around my grandmother and her life in this transition and the inter-warriers in the Balkans and the influence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire on this emergence of nation states in the Balkans and these ideas of liberalism and fascism and socialism which were all there in the interwar period which I think are really important also to understand the current predicament because I think there's always a comparison between now and the 1930s 1929 crisis financial crisis and this kind of birth of different ideologies.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To some extent as well. And then the last, I guess, the last influence is philosophical, and that's more my studies and kind of almost foundational. In the book, I'm really interested in enlightenment, philosophical tradition, and especially in Kant and Marx. And most of my work is trying to show that there is an overlap in this philosophical traditions and ideas of Kant that tell us what the right thing to do and how to think about morality that can be combined productively with ideas of Marx around critiques of existing societies and that give you a good foundation from which to think about the future and to think about sort of future social systems in a way. But yeah, it's a combination of literature and German Russian literature, I'd say, and German philosophy.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growing up as a teenager, right? I became really interested in Dostoevsky and 19th century Russian literature especially, so called Stoyan Dostoyevsky. And I think partly because they were gravitating all these authors were gravitating around these same themes of kind of freedom and necessity, which are also part of this Greek myth that I was talking about. And at some point I was reading in 1997, I was reading war and peace. And I remember the war and peace ends with this kind of big sweeping critique of the philosophy of history where, you know, Todd Stoy tries to show how it's pointless to try and reconstruct meaning in history. And I remember that that was what made me decide to study philosophy, this kind of thinking about this line and thinking, well, is it true that there's no meaning in history and is it true that there is no thousands different actions and reactions mean that it all kind of absurd? And then I guess the third, so this was my, I guess, in terms of literature, this is my world, this 19th century novels, and in particular classical Russians.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I have always been a great reader. And so it wasn't so much that I was reading when I was writing things that would put me in the mood for writing this book. It's more that I sort of recovered all the different things that I had been attracted in. And I guess I could, you know, if I talk about writers, I think I could divide it in phases and stages almost. If I think about my childhood, because I grew up with very little television, I was into classical Greek literature. So I was reading a lot of Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, and I was obsessed with Greek tragedies and Greek myths because I couldn't get my head around the fact that Greek gods were both powerful and powerless at the same time. So that was my sort of first range of influence really came from this kind of classical Greek myths world, basically. And also all this tragedies that are somehow tragedies about discovering the truth and so on, I felt they probably were quite important in the way in which I was thinking about literary and literary techniques and so on. And then when I was...”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eastern Europe, which I think perhaps explains some of the hostility that you now see in a lot of Eastern countries to basically liberal institutions and to this kind of liberalizing effort. I feel that the transition took its toll in many of these states. And I mean, you could also, if you read Zvetlana Alexievich, for example, talks about the Soviet Union, so on. Some of these experiences of transition were equally harsh and equally a disappointment for people in these other parts of Eastern Europe, not just in Albania. And I think that has”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think because the experience of communism was very, very radical and very different and much more austere in a way. I think the transition to liberalism was also in some ways more radical and more austere and harder. But when I gave my books to friends from Eastern Europe and now I get lots of emails from readers from Eastern Europe who always say to me, well, I grew up in Poland, but I really recognize your childhood. We all had bubblegum wrappers and I think there is a sort of a category of the ex-communist ex-child that is a kind of general identity which cuts across national boundaries. And so I get lots of, as I say, Romanians or people across the Soviet Union writing to me and saying, yeah, we had this as well. We had these state classes where we were told about the proletariat. And so some of the categories were obviously similar. And I think what I've also noticed is that the sense in which liberalism turned out to be a betrayal is also widespread.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, she kept saying this embassy official who didn't give me my visa for my women in my organization, I bet his wife does all the jogs all the time and someone else does her care work. And so she had all these kind of ways of thinking about domestic labor and distribution, which weren't just about gender. They were often also about class and about distribution of power and so on. So I think a woman has done to me because I feel like it's an ongoing process of reflection that I only really started thinking clearly about very, very late in my life that I didn't grow up with this awareness.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had this very hostile attitude to tokenism. So at one point, she was the leader of a women's organization in Albania in the 90s, which was a kind of opposition women. And her job was to try and get visas for the mothers of immigrants. And she hated the fact that these working class women weren't given visas because they were seen as suspicious. But on the other hand, her association was told all the time to kind of do affirmative action. And she was like, what is this affirmative action? I don't get it. I hate this stuff. I don't care about it. Why are they not giving the visas to my working mothers? You know, these are women who want to see their children. And somehow she felt that the way in which she was, the way in which these decisions were made were very arbitrary and very tokenistic and very superficial. And so I had grown up seeing that. And I think part of me was quite hostile as well to this tokenistic way of talking about gender questions without thinking of all the relationships. And my mom was very resentful.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About it afterwards, and I have this chapter in a book in which I try to reflect on questions of gender a bit more. I felt that when I thought about this afterwards, it wasn't quite like that because it's true that they were officially formally equal, but it's also there was a legacy of the past, which meant that women actually did most of the domestic labor. And so women did yes outside all the state jobs like men, so there would be drivers, drive truck drivers, train drivers, work in the mines, the engineers, whatever. But then they would also come home and look after children all the time and they would wake up at five in the morning. I had all these friends who didn't have grandmothers who lived with them and so couldn't share with grandparents the domestic labor. And they would, you know, their mothers would wake up at four in the morning and clean the houses frantically until it was time to go to work and then they'd go to work and then come back and then look after children. So basically they did everything. So I think it's a complex question. And it's not one that, as I say, because I was never urged to reflect on from very early on and because my mother always”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, this is a very good question. It's a very interesting question, also because it's a question that unsettled in my mind as well. I feel that I discovered gender really, really late in my life, actually, in part because I grew up with these very strong women for whom bigger women was never singled out as in any way important. My mom was definitely the kind of dominant parent. And so she was never struggling for voice in the family and also in society more generally. My grandmother was the same. She's very strong. So I had these very strong role models. And also in Albania, the rhetoric in communist Albania was that women would formally do everything that men did. So they would work in mines and they would work in every state job. There were no women that stayed at home. So formally, it was a very equal society, equal both in its opportunities and in its oppression. So you would oppress equally men and women and you would give opportunities in some ways. It wasn't quite like that.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's less nostalgic than other countries. I think there's more nostalgia about communist years in Eastern Europe, but there's certainly, when I talk to people, when I talk to taxi drivers or when I go to Albania and sort of try and get the word on the street, people would say, oh, there were more hospitals here and we didn't have this or there was more solidarity back then. And so there are a sense in which people are nostalgic about certain aspects of not so much communism, but life in common under communism and about their social relations and what they have lost, the fact that this is a society that is now a society of immigrants. There's lots of people who have left their homes. And so the families have been disrupted by this process. And so there is a sense in which I guess many mis community. But I don't think there is a desire to return to having communists Albania in the way communist Albania would have been part of which the state story about communist Albania would have.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I made a very conscious effort because I knew, and this is also partly why there is this child and the book is written in the voice of a child, because I think to have a child character, it's almost like you have the tindrum or there's these characters in the history of literature where you have a kind of naive character that records the complexity of the world around them. And because the main character is so naive, you could have lots of different stories and lots of different interpretations that play out. And because I didn't want to, I wanted to write the book as a political philosopher, and so I didn't want to be paternalistic with the readers in terms of telling them this is how you should interpret reality and this is how you should interpret communism and this is how you should interpret liberalism. I just wanted to tell different stories of different people and talk about different conceptions of freedom and then let the reader draw their own conclusions and join the conversation in a way. And somehow this has worked everywhere except for Albania.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harm others that also on both sides of society. So it's a very complex society which is very divided in part because of this complexity of responsibility. And so to talk about the past in a way that is nuanced and more importantly, the way which I try to do in my book, which is to just let lots of different voices talk and have lots of different ways of telling the story.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess it's... It's a little bit less positive than in the rest of the world, let's say. So But I don't want to over-labor this point or overdo it, but I think because it has had such universal acclaim in everywhere else, apart from Albania, I'd say that the only one or two critical reviews, very critical reviews that there have been of the book have been in Albania. And in part because I think the discourse around the past and historical injustice in particular, these are Albania is still very much a divided society that suffers from this legacy of historical unsettling of accounts in a way and there is constantly an effort to find responsibilities and to talk about the past, but in this very complex network of responsibilities in a way where everybody was both a victim and an oppressor and people had spies in their family or there were honest people both among party officials and amongst kind of formerly persecuted former victims of the regime and there were people who would be nasty and”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discourse is about the outside world shape the sensitivities of ordinary people. And so I don't want to tell the story when I tell the story of Albanian socialism, just of the state structures and of the state repression. I also want to talk about society and human relations and ideas of solidarity that flourished in hardship and so on. And that's where I think you could recover this idea that there was a parallel freedom, which wasn't necessarily the freedom brought by the state, but which was almost like a freedom that even that repressive state couldn't kill in a way that was there in human relations.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think there was anything that was free and democratic about the Albanian communist system, but what I think there was, was there was a critique of the outside world and there were things that were being said about other countries, about capitalist countries, for example, about the exploitation that existed in other parts of the world or about unequal development or about child labor, which I think were and are still true. So there was a sense in which what was going on in Albania I think was fundamentally flawed and wrong and brutal and oppressive. But there was a story about the outside world that was being told in Albania which had some overlaps with, I think, some things that are still true. And so this is what when I talk about Albanian society, I don't want to talk just about the repression and the brutality and the kind of the official state propaganda. I also want to talk about the way in which”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, no, I'm very tolerant of disagreement. So it's not that I was just perplexed because I felt that we celebrated the same heroes and that there were the same books that people thought were interesting and persuasive and worth reading. But I somehow approached Das Capit with a completely different way of relating to it from how people approach. So there were a lot of people there who would approach this as this kind of almost like a religious text who had the truth.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About my childhood and about my moral education teacher and what we knew about Marx in school, which had been very simplified for children. But I still somehow related them to my childhood and to my background. And the thing that I remember drew me almost into this whole literature and this way of thinking was their responses, which was, well, what you had wasn't really socialism. And, you know, this isn't really Marx, yeah, yeah, you know. You thought you had an interest in Marx and you thought you understood Marx, but actually were really mistaken. And for me, that was a bit like a kind of an instance of almost liberal paternalism in the way in which you approach the people who come from the periphery and you just tell them, well, you know, we know better than you what's development and we know better than you. Sorry.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Class Albanian family, when you go to Italy, you're in 1990, you're just one of the many Albanians who go to Italy and immediately you become a target of, these were the years in which there was lots of racism and lots of stereotypization of Albanians because there had been all these waves of Albanian immigrants in Italy in the 90s. And so basically being an Albanian in the 90s in Italy was like being someone who would steal money or be really suspicious. There was lots of racism. So basically that meant that the people that I became friends with were the ones who were extremely keen to show me that they were very open to immigrants and they loved Albanians and so on. So almost went the other way, which meant they were usually from the kind of far left or something like that. And the thing that attracted, so I had all these friends from the left, and the thing that was really interesting was that every time we celebrated, they read, they did this reading groups on Marx and so on, and they invited me to this reading groups. And I kept thinking.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because for me, it was a way of recovering a story about freedom and about the left, which I felt had been obscured in communist Albania as much as there had been censorship of liberalism and of free market structures and so on. So I felt I was curious. And I remember I said, I decided to study philosophy. My parents were really hostile to this choice because they associated philosophy to Marxism and they hated Marxists because they hate because effectively in communist Albania being a Marxist meant being someone who was reporting on them or someone who was in a party and the spy. And so they were extremely hostile to philosophy because they were hostile to Marxism. And I had promised that I would study philosophy, but I would steer away from Marx. But then eventually I went to Italy, I studied in Rome, and I was hanging out with, I was an immigrant in Italy. So even though I came from this kind of”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protect us, but we had the open society institute, for example, that was given opportunities to everyone to flourish and find their roots in this new liberal society.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there was a sense then afterwards when I reflect on this, I think there was a sense in which you can't live, it's very hard to live without an ideology. It's almost like faith or like religion or something. You know, you need a system of belief somehow. And I think that it was this transition from one belief structure to another belief structure that was really sudden and which meant that people didn't really have time to elaborate the interpretive categories with which they might develop a criticism of society or question what they were getting into. And so it's true, for example, that we had political pluralism, but we didn't have a single anti-system party that emerged in 1990. They were all basically committed to this new world of freedom and democracy. And so, yeah, I think that there was a sense in which we had had a dictatorship of the proletariat and then we didn't have that category anymore. But what we did have was the new civil society or that, you know, we didn't have, I don't know, the party didn't.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Burning of the books in the neighborhood, and I remember I rushed home to try and get the Enverjoda book that I had to try and burn it. And my dad was like, no, no, we don't burn books. Even if it's Enverhoda. Not even him.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I wanted to talk about the power of ideology in a way in shaping the world and the way we understand the world and kind of creating the interpretive categories with which you interrogate everything that's around you. And I think it was a little bit like that because it's true that under communism there was censorship and so there was some discourses that you either didn't have access to or you had access to with great difficulty and there were books that you could read. And then eventually I remember in 1990 people were literally burning books. They were burning marks and they were burning Lenin and everything that they had in their libraries and they were everybody was really excited about Hayek and Friedman and von Mises and they're all the kind of Austrians were suddenly discovered. And I remember this because I remember my family, which was unusual in the way which they responded to all these things. My dad was saying, well, we don't burn books. That was very, you know, as a child. First, I was very committed communist and then I became very committed capitalist. So I decided to participate in this kind of mass.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What to do at university. And I was so paralyzed about the future that I couldn't think of a single profession that I wanted to commit to, which is why I ended up doing philosophy, because it wasn't a profession. You just ask questions, you know.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To going up and down the pavements in Italy, or someone is doing cigarettes or things like that, or someone smuggling people. So all of these things where there was no sense of moral assessment or there are no moral hierarchies in a way. People would just do whatever they could to survive. And this is the world in which I was maturing. And in 1997, that world really kind of came, everything almost concentrated in this image of brutality and state collapse, which was in some way similar to 1990 because it felt like a systemic breakdown. But in other words, even worse, because in 1990 there was this idea that things are changing and there is hope. And in 1997, as far as I could make a lot, there was not even hope because there wasn't a new system that you could transition to. It was just that same system that you had to somehow live with. And that was what I found really hard, which made me, I guess, existentially question a lot of things. In fact, I had to decide this was here in which I had to do my A-levels and I had to do this.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parents weren't doing because for them this was something that had been promised all their lives and most of their lives had been spent in hardship and now it was just a question of kind of wrapping up and making one final effort. Whereas for me, half of my life had been under communism and I didn't remember the brutality of it because I just hadn't lived it and I hadn't perceived it firsthanded like that. And then the second half was going through just growing up and part of the discomfort of growing up is the anxiety and the insecurity and the kind of discovery of the world. But the other was that the world that I was coming to discover was not a pretty world to look at because my friends were leaving. There was sex trafficking. There was drug trafficks everywhere. A lot of people had to make a living out of whatever they could because the state, they knew the state wasn't protecting them. And so they began to take up these jobs that they all considered as they were all mentioned as normal employments. When I said someone was doing drugs, it was as though you'd said in communist and you'd say someone is a bus driver or someone is a nurse and now you'd say someone is just.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were these moments of darkness and a sense in which the securities had gone, but the new freedoms hadn't quite arrived or they hadn't quite arrived for everyone. And what differed, I think, in my case from that of my parents and my grandmother was that for them these were all transition costs and sacrifices that you had to make because freedom had a cost and because we'd had this very hard life under communism and so now we just had to kind of put off with one last effort. And to me it resembled very much the rhetoric of the last years of communism in Albania where we were increasingly poor and increasingly there was scarcity and the repuse and things weren't working. It was very opposite we weren't working but there was a rhetoric and a discourse around the fact that well it's because we are the only country that is committed to communism and it's because of socialist freedom and we want freedom to work for everyone. So I could see in a way I was putting the two systems in parallel and kind of assessing them equally critically in a way in which”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there was a sense in which what happened in 1990 was that there was this fundamental belief and faith in this new society that would come and that would deliver freedom. And for a lot of people who had lived under communism, like my parents, who had lived all their lives under communism, like my parents and my grandmother before then, there was a sense in which the transition brought its sacrifices and these sacrifices just needed to be made in the name of this better world, even though it was very obvious and very plain to everyone to see that the cultural transition had its costs. A lot of people were losing jobs and a lot of states, enterprises were closing down. There was lots of migration outside Albania. And then eventually there were this fraudulent pyramid Ponzi schemes which asked people to put their investments and hope for high savings and then they all collapsed. And so in 1997, the whole country basically ended up in something close to civil war because of this financial collapse. So throughout the...”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Soon. And I think I was equally subjected in a way to the influence of the family and of the state. And it's only 1990 that it became clear that these two influence were pulling in opposite directions. Before that, they seemed to be going in the same direction. And it was only in 1990 that it caused a sort of almost like an identity crisis.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I was unusual. I mean, I didn't know that I was unusual, obviously. There was a sense in which, as I say, with through the French or through the kind of family culture or through the way in which my parents, for example, never hit me. And this was unusual. A lot of people were hit by parents. And I mean, it wasn't like violent, but there were certain norms in my family, which I think it's fair to say they weren't on the conventions of Albanian society. that stood out certainly. So I knew I stood out, but I didn't know for what reason I stood out. And it was never conveyed to me that there was a different political identity, which I carried with me, which came from my parents and my family background, my grandmother especially, that was the reason for why I stood out. And so I had grown up with this sense of not quite belonging, but since I was very committed ideologically, I was making up for this sense of not belonging that came from the family by being even more committed in a way to the society and by being kind of good.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I only like to eat honey, and my parents were saying, No, you can't have honey. There's no honey in the shops, you can only have jam or fig jam, which was the kind of staple that you could find in every shop. It was fig jam. And I hated fig jam. So I remember these moments of fighting and my grandmother had this expression, which I eventually later discovered came from Brecht, where she said it was a kind of subversion of Brecht. You know, Brecht says, first can't food and then comes morality. And my grandmother had reverted that into first.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember it as ideal, and I mean, I don't know, I think it's because I never, as a child, suffered from political oppression in a way. You know, when you're a child, you don't have political opinions and you don't think of censorship in that political way. You think about security and the things that someone asked me recently if I was afraid of anything during communism in Albania. And I think, were you afraid of anything politically? And when I tried to think about things I had been afraid of, I could think of dogs and drunken people, but nothing really to do with the system or with society or with the police. So I felt like my life was very secure. And when I remembered these moments of childhood pre-awareness before knowing what was going on in my family, they were these moments of the pioneer camp and the queues. And it wasn't a site. It wasn't, they weren't memories without scarcity because I also remember that I was, for example, having these fights because I wanted to eat honey.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Express yourself irony and jokes are one way in which you could almost just about do it. You always have to be very careful with jokes and you have to know where you make them and who you make them with and how you make them. But irony, I think, is a very revealing attitude to life and to a lot of things, actually. So this has been partly in the family. And I think it's also maybe a little bit in kind of Balkan East European culture is this approach, which is almost kind of ironic slash absurd to very tragic things people make jokes about death all the time and they have this very dark humor which I think is a way of bringing together very very serious issues but in a way that doesn't lead people to just kind of flagellate themselves and be just depressed and holistic but to somehow find a way of saying look you need to somehow cope with stuff and get by and yeah”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's maybe in the background somehow, I think both in the family background, so my father was very ironic and he always made a lot of jokes and he had this very kind of irony and comic approach to very tragic things. And so one of the things that I remember from very early on, very early on in my life was my dad had all these anti-imperialist jokes. And so the first time in which I heard about the Middle Eastern conflict and the problem of refugees in the Middle East was when I had friends over for sleepovers and we would lay out mattresses on the floor and he would say, oh, good night, Palestinian can. And I had no idea, this was really, I was my five or six or something. We had cousins over and I remember thinking, what is a Palestinian camp and so on? So this is my first kind of socialization into political issues. Was this through this approach which he had, which he eventually even almost elaborated later on where he said to me, well, you know, if you're in a very censored society, in a very oppressive state, and you have to find ways”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the way I was brought to it was I was always sensitive to this different ideas of freedom and to the nuances of talking about freedom, actually. So I got to the book with characters, as I said, and with personal histories and with details and family stories.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did we not have anyone who was fighting in the war, but also the only person that we could relate to in history because we had the same surname was this fascist collaborator? And so this was a huge source of disappointment and my family always said to me, we're not related. He just happens to have the same surname. He also happened to have the same name as my father. So it was name and surname, the same thing. So I could not be asked about this character every year. But somehow I had to explain to my school friends that we didn't have anything to do with him and that it was just a coincidence until it turned out in 1990 when things changed in Albania that it wasn't a coincidence. But in fact, he was my great-grandfather and that my father was called the same as his granddad basically because also this is what they did in this sort of big families they would call after ancestors in a way. Yeah, that was one of the mysteries of childhood eventually revealed in 1990, which was really, again, a big surprise and blow in a way.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this also wasn't nearly a recurrence, actually, not just because we studied about him in history classes in school. He was the equivalent of the Marichal P ⁇ tant. So he was the equivalent of the kind of the head of the Vichy government who would have handed over the Albanian crown from King Zog, who was in power at that point in the late 30s to the Italian fascists, who had already colonized Albania de facto, but not officially. So there were all these years in the 30s where Albania was increasingly subject to Italian influence, but there was this pivotal moment where at some point the Italians invaded. And this character was there to give the crown of the king from the king who had been his former collaborator to these new Italian masters. And this was, and he was in every history class, as you can imagine, in communist Albania talking about fascism and the resistance and so on. Every Albanian had basically had a family relative or a grandfather who fought in the resistance. And then there was this, we didn't have anyone who fought in the resistance, that was one problem. The second problem was not only...”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're waiting for your birthday. We're waiting for this to happen. So somehow it was never the right time to put a photo in Ravoja. I remember especially after his death, I was completely troubled by the fact that we didn't have a photo of Venharoja and I was so committed, really wanted to meet him when he died, all the work collectives in Albania went to pay tribute to the grave, and I was begging my father to take me when his work would go. And somehow he didn't bring me. And I remember all this sort of childhood moments where I don't remember exactly how the lead up to these events, but I do remember this sensation of my parents were letting me down because I had this commitment to communism from school and in general I was really persuaded and my parents somehow were very quite strange about it. They wouldn't say don't do it or they wouldn't say we don't want a photo in Verodo. In fact, every time I brought it out explicitly, they would say, of course we want it. Of course we love Enverogo and so on, but they actually never did it and never brought the photo.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will speak to their children in French. It was very unusual. But also because my grandmother was in French, she'd never been to France. She didn't have any relatives in France. She spoke French with an Albanian accent. And I know this because whenever we watch television and there were French films with subtitles, I could see that her accent was different from the actors of sort of French people. But somehow I had been brought up speaking French and I knew there was something to do with my family. And my grandmother always said, oh, it's because we like the French Revolution or you liked Le Miserable, which we used to read at school. And there was a puppet show with Cosette and so on. So there were always this kind of cultural reasons. And then another thing that really stood out was that in communist Albania, everyone had photos of Enverholja in their living room. And I remember I was completely obsessed with why we didn't have a photo of Enverholja. And my parents kept finding excuses and saying, well, we need a nice frame. We've ordered the frame, but it's not coming.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this word biography played a really important role because it was the term that we invoked to explain things about people. And we would distinguish between people with good biographies and with bad biographies, people with stained biographies and people with clean biographies. And I remember that I was surrounded by this word in school and through television at home and so on. And I didn't quite know what it meant. And as with all words where you don't really know what they mean, you're also afraid to ask because I think it's so obvious that you shouldn't be asking about it. But it has something to do with your family background. And one thing that I reflected on my family background from very early on as a child, because I knew that there was something about me that was different in communist Albania. The one thing that was different and really stood out was the fact that my French was my first language. So people spoke French and my grandmother spoke French to me when I was growing up. And this was not common. And it was not common not just because nobody...”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“School who kept And this was for me the moment of revolution, was a moment of seeing that somebody had stolen Stalin's head. And, you know, it's really hard to explain and to kind of convey to people how you could be really attached to this figure for all your life and think this is one of the most important people in the history of humanity and a moral leader and a kind of moral ideal. And then somehow you realize that your fellow citizens or someone has out of the blue gone and done something which was completely inconceivable. And why would they do that? And in addition to that, they were shouting freedom and democracy. And I also remember thinking, well, why are they shouting freedom and democracy? We have a lot of freedom. We have a lot of democracy. So that was the moment for me where I began to think that something was not as it appeared to be.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was part of the everyday discourse in Albania, which meant that all these changes that were swiping Eastern Europe around that time, we didn't feel that were changes that were touching Albania in a way. We felt kind of left out. Except things began to change in Albania as well, and somehow as things happen, when revolutions happen, you can never say there was this moment in which something changed. For me, the moment in which something changed was the moment in which I had stumbled in a protest by mistake coming out of school and just going, taking the wrong way. And this is all written in my diary of the time. And I started with that because I started with this diary and I remembered this episode of me hiding behind the statue of Stalin. And I was really scared because there was this people shouting on the street and dogs barking and following them. And I had gone to hide behind Stalin because I couldn't see anywhere else where to hide. But when I was hiding, I was also remembering my teachers, we did this class moral education.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in fact, the slogan was that Albania was the anti-imperialist lighthouse of the world. And so, and I was fundamentally convinced of this. And in fact, we were told in school that we headed hard, that we were isolated because we were on the right side and every time someone is on the right side, they are always fighting with the rest of the world because there's all kinds of motives that make people not want to do the right thing. So when this protest happened in 1990, there had been a few year between 1989 and 1990 was a strange year for Albania because we were aware that things were changing in the rest of the world. But because we had been so cut off and so isolated from Eastern Europe and because the discourse in Albania was that these East European countries had begun to abandon socialism a long time ago and in fact Albania had left Warsaw Pact in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Prague. So there was a criticism of these real world other socialist states.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was in December 1990, which is when things began to change in Albania. So 1990 rather than 1989 was the year of shifts and revolution for Albania. Albania was in 1990 a very isolated country. It had been isolated for most of the second half of the 20th century, but increasingly isolated. It began as an ally of Yugoslavia, then of the Soviet Union, then of China. And by the time in which I was growing up in the 80s, we were completely on our own. And the rhetoric in school was that we were on our own because we were the only country left on earth that was still committed to the ideals of communism and to socialism as the transition to communism. And so in moral education, we were told about how everybody else around us had betrayed the legacy of Stalin, but there was this one proud nation in the Balkans, which was still holding on to Stalin and holding on to the tradition and promoting these communist ideals.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had somehow appeared one way or another in characters and so on. And so that's how it became more and more personal and took the project then took on a life of its own. And I was then abandoned to these characters that I remembered and began to use different material, stop reading philosophy books, started going back to the diaries that I had kept as a child. And so then it was an archaeological project in a way of recovery and discovery of an old self that I had kind of forgotten almost about.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what the socialist tradition in political thought does is to really radicalize the liberal idea of freedom and to talk about the ways in which capitalists' economic systems it actually produces margins of unfreedom and produces oppression and exploitation in ways that don't really reflect this ideal of freedom that is at the heart of it as a philosophical tradition. So I wanted to write about ideas and I wanted to write about real world institutions and also how these ideas in some ways get distorted or reflected in real life. And I started thinking about examples because I was going to write a book for the mass markets and it wasn't going to be an academic book so I wanted to communicate to a wide readership. And as I began to write this book, the more I thought about it, the more I thought about examples, the more they came from Albania and not just Albania, but my own early life in Albania. And so, in fact, I had memories of childhood and then teenage years and all these reflections on freedom.”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for joining and to look for reading the book and for your kind words and for your kind review. So it wasn't intentional, I guess like all good things or a lot of good things happened aren't intentional. I initially planned to write a book on freedom and I wanted to talk about freedom both as a moral ideal and as it's institutionalized, as it appears in different political systems and the extent to which these institutions reflect freedom or betray freedom. And I wanted to write about it in connection to liberal and socialist traditions because one of my longstanding academic theoretical philosophical convictions has been that freedom is the common core of these traditions, both liberalism and socialism. Although a lot of people tend to think of liberalism as committed to this idea of freedom and socialism as committed to equality,”
2022-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · Coming of Age at the End of History, with Lea Ypi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT