Identity, History, Indignity | Salon Talk with Lea Ypi

Political philosopher Lea Ypi returns to Full Circle House in Brussels to explore themes of dignity, history, memory, identity and nationhood - prompted by an online photo of her happy grandparents on their 1941 honeymoon, while war raged all over Europe. Records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania - or at least that had been the official story until that moment. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past - the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family delving into secret police archives, Ypi grapples with uncertainty.

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, she explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? Blending memoir with historical investigation, we dive into the struggle to preserve individual dignity against surveillance and grand political narratives.

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ABOUT The Speaker

lea Ypi (FBA, Fae) is Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at Lse, a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. A native of Albania, she has degrees in Philosophy and in Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a PhD from the European University Institute and was a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the author of Indignity: A Life Reimagined and Free: Coming of Age at the end of History, both published by Penguin Press as well as Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, published by Oxford University Press. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and won numerous prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Award, the Ridenhour Prize for truth-telling, the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement. She coedits the journal Political Philosophy and occasionally writes for the Financial Times and the Guardian.