“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Now everything was different. Nothing was pre-established anymore, everything had to be redone.”
Many people these days may have read “Confini di classe” (Feltrinelli, 2025), the small collection of essays by Lea Ypi, in which the author technically but passionately addresses the double knot that links the class question to that of citizenship. Reading “Libera”, her autobiographical novel published a few years ago, perhaps helps to understand how one can arrive at such a lucid vision even if, it must be said, in the overall circumstances one must consider an agility of intellect that is not exactly common. Ypi has the merit of making every concept accessible, unravelling the complexities in a linear and less hostile sequence.
The voice she chooses to tell her story is that of her child self and it is precisely through this gaze that we can recognize the manipulative instance of every dogmatic and uncritical ideology: it becomes the reality in which we are immersed and which, willingly or not, becomes part of us. “The Party had disappeared, and yet it was still there: it was above us, but also inside us”. So what to do? Meanwhile, a step back. What does “Libera” tell? The history of Albania from 1985 to 1997: through the eyes of a young Lea we experience the socialist utopia, the dream of communism to come, the roar of their collapse, the war, the first boats of migrants, the hypocritical and changeable reactions of our country in the face of that mass escape, the broken families, the decision, finally, to study philosophy against all her father’s recommendations (today Lea Ypi teaches Political Philosophy at the London School of Economics).
The people in the author’s life become characters in a contradictory History in which facts, truth, interpretation, religion, freedom are the object of continuous critical re-elaboration, never given, never definitive. And so, by telling her story, Ypi provides us with the tools to build the framework of a living, embodied, unruly thought: she does not renounce the complexity that has led her, today, to elaborate such clear statements on the class struggle, to problematize both capitalism and its rhetorical and often out of focus responses; to ultimately turn to the left, to its weak, short-sighted and helpless proposals, in the hope of regaining a dignified, courageous and critical way of being in society.
“If the events of my family and my country have anything to teach, it is that no one ever makes history in the circumstances they have chosen,” she writes. And so in the family gallery, the figure of the father stands out before our eyes, a man who has made irony his own survival, who believes in the revolution that is yet to come and in men who are already dead, split from the present, intolerant of its cynicism, incapable of fighting (as instead the mother), defeated by reality. A portrait that is, we believe, a call for action by contrast, to the mobilization of principles, to act with an honesty that cannot remain only thought. Perhaps, the best answer to that “what to do?” mentioned above.
“This is why I wrote my story: to explain, to reconcile and to continue the fight.”
Written by Delis
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Lea Ypi, Libera, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2022
Original edition: Free, Penguin, New York, 2021