Lea, before Free came out in 2021 you were an acclaimed scholar with several monographs on politics and philosophy. What made you turn to life-writing, which presumably was a very different kind of exercise?
There was a contingent reason and a more long-standing one. The long-standing reason was that I came to philosophy through literature—I was always drawn to philosophical novels. I discovered philosophy through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and all those great 19th-century novels that explored universal themes. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought that to be a good writer you needed to be a philosopher. But then I became a professional scholar, and academic discussions and debates took up all my time.
What then happened was that during the Covid pandemic, I started writing this book about freedom, motivated by my research and by an idea I’d always had that there was something in common between socialist and liberal thought and practice, especially in their shared commitment to freedom. A lot of people think of socialism as being about equality, and liberalism about freedom, but I was always keen to explore how these values overlapped. What made me write Free as a memoir was that I was writing it during the pandemic. We were in lockdown. I was completely cut off from my academic community, actually writing in this tiny cupboard-sized space in Berlin with my kids running around the house.
That’s when it occurred to me that there are these moments in history when the large and small scales of life converge. The pandemic was global, but we lived it locally, in our daily lives. It occurred to me that it had also been like that in Albania during the transition from communism to capitalism. You felt that there were these world-historical events happening outside your window, but they were also happening in your school, in the books you were reading, in the conversations you were having with your family and friends. This made me think of memoir as a way of going back to what I thought good literature was supposed to do, which is to somehow connect the individual with the universal.
Did writing Free allow you to revisit some of the arguments you had made previously in your academic books? Did it change how you thought about philosophy and politics?
Yes. I think I engaged with the lived experience of socialism a lot more through and after Free. It’s not that I didn’t know it—I’d always taught about Marx and Marxism, and I had a fascination for that whole body of thought—but I had not engaged as much with the experience of people who had actually lived it, who had seen such thought translated into action. Writing a memoir of my family forced me to reckon with that experience far more than I had before. My work became more empirically informed because, although I had been critical of European Marxists for being too abstract, I was, to be honest, guilty of that same abstraction myself.
Free made me go back and rethink what I had been teaching and how. It made me much more critical, reflexive and interdisciplinary, in a productive way. Above all, it changed my perspective and disposition—I could no longer be naively optimistic about the future, but nor could I be completely cynical and nihilistic. I had to be both critical and constructive in how I understood our present moment. That’s very much where I am now in how I engage with my work. My story, like that of many people, is one of loss, disappointment and disillusionment. How do I turn that into something that doesn’t simply lead to pessimism, apathy and nihilism? That matters to me, because I want to think constructively about the future.
Let me turn now to your grandmother Nini and the fundamental role she has in your recent books. I was struck by how many times you use the word ‘dignity’ in your writing. In Free you recall Nini saying: ‘We lost everything, but we did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity because dignity has nothing to do with money, honours and titles.’ A lot of people associate dignity with freedom, but Nini seems to be saying to you that she lost her freedom but not her dignity. You were eleven years old when you heard this from Nini. Tell me the impact of Nini’s formulation on your later thinking.
The reason it comes up at that moment in Free, in the way it does, is that up to that point in my life freedom had always come wrapped in ideology. It wasn’t possible to think of it otherwise. Up until 1990, it was freedom within a state-socialist system; after 1990, it became freedom within a capitalist society. But when you strip freedom of its ideological packaging, it has a quality that is really hard to grasp, because of its transcendental nature. It has something to do with agency, with being a person with moral capacity, but it is not something you can ever see fully materialised, it is more a yearning and a promise. And yet historically, whether it’s socialism, capitalism or any other social manifestation we’ve experienced, the promise of freedom has led to disappointment. So, when my grandmother says we did not lose our dignity despite losing certain material benefits, she is trying to capture what is left of humans when they no longer trust any ideology fully. For me, that’s very important. I am a socialist, but the kind of socialism I believe in is very much a socialism of the future. There were instances of dehumanisation in communist societies, and you can’t just close your eyes and pretend it didn’t happen.
That is your family’s story in a nutshell—the struggle to hold on to dignity.
Yes, exactly.
So Nini’s words stayed with you even though, perhaps even because, they contradicted all other accounts of freedom you have encountered?
Yes. I think they saved me from losing faith in humans altogether. Through my grandmother’s words I was always mindful of the fact that, despite all these catastrophic historical disappointments, there is something in humans that you need to hold on to and believe in, because otherwise you end up with nihilism. Whenever I think philosophically—and it comes out very clearly in Indignity—the most radical adversary of this sort of Kantian hope comes from the Nietzschean tradition. Nietzschean philosophy gives up on morality altogether, it reduces it to ideology, and that’s where I part company with that tradition. It’s not something I find sustainable. What makes us accept this amoral view of the human, rather than what my grandmother learned from her experience? We can think of nihilism as a prediction about what humans are capable of, sure, but if historical evidence counts for anything, Nini’s thoughts may also have capture something irreducibly human, the imperative to try to preserve humanity rather than give up on it.
Is it fair to call it a leap of faith?
It’s a kind of leap of faith, yes—one that feels more warranted once you can engage with history counterfactually. That’s also why I think literature is so important, because literature offers you a way of reading history in this way.
Speaking of counterfactuals, I want to move to Indignity now. There, you say that you have always been awestruck by the power archives have in the ordering of facts. You go so far as to say that all statements concerning the reality of things depend on the existence of archives. But the book is also about how archives disorganise reality—in fact about how they produce what may be called ‘irreality’. Is this a productive contradiction in your thinking?
What I suggest in Indignity is that facts as such matter less than how one interprets them. There are better and worse interpretations: some rest on rational criteria that yield a more accurate ordering and reconstruction of facts than others. But I don’t believe that bare facts alone can offer a measure of truth.
The measure of truth, I think, is always about our relationship with the world—about how we construct and interpret it, and about how pluralistic and open we can be to including other perspectives. This feeling is partly a result of my encounter with the archives. You go, or at least I went, to the archives thinking there is an objective order of facts there, because that’s what gets drilled into us every day. Everything—your identity, birth certificate, passport—comes from some archive out there, but whether you believe in those facts depends on your relationship with the mechanism or institution through which they are transmitted to you.
If you lose faith in that mechanism or institution, you naturally ask yourself what lies outside it. That’s partly why I think the question of indignity is connected to that of freedom. In Free, the question was about the authority of the family. At some point, the authority of the family is broken, because you discover that you are not the child you thought you were, nor in the family you thought you were. Then the authority of the state is also broken—not just the Albanian communist state, but any state. The question in Indignity is developed further: it becomes how to doubt better, and how to ask the right questions of every kind of authority. I realised that the archive will only answer the questions you put to it.
Isn’t there a danger though, Lea, with general suspicion of facts and dismissal of the expertise required to interpret them? Can such feelings not be manipulated by completely unscrupulous and power-hungry people like the so-called ‘tech-billionaires’ who are destroying our societies today?
Yes. But it is not so much about dismissing expertise as asking how expertise and political consensus are connected, how the values we take for granted shape our ordering of facts, and what justifies the values we subscribe to beyond the fact that an authority asks us to believe in them. So the only thing I’d put differently from you is that it’s not so much that I lost faith in facts, but that I mistrusted the authorities who put the facts in a certain order.
So how does one learn to ask the right kind of questions of archives?
Well, one doesn’t necessarily lose faith to the same degree in all authorities. For me, there are real differences between a website that makes things up and another authority—legacy media, say—which tells me a story I know to be the product of a process of corroboration and verification, and is therefore itself verifiable. The deliberate lies peddled by somebody sitting at a keyboard somewhere, on the other hand, are not part of such a process.
There are differences in how you reflect on the order of facts, basically. We don’t have a perfect method, but I think we arrive at the right questions by being as inclusive as possible in our perspectives. Generalisation, reciprocity and the difference between values and interests are also crucial. An interest, for example, is self-referential, whereas a value is something that applies to other beings. Take the laws of nature. How do we think about the difference between a law of nature and a contingent generalisation? We say a law of nature has a kind of validity because the patterns it tracks hold across many different cases. I think this same epistemic criterion—how we differentiate contingent manifestations from more general rules—also applies to our thinking about social facts.
For me, the more inclusive the standpoint from which we consider the truth is, the more we ask what perspectives have been considered or excluded, the more effective our method is. In one case, the excluded perspective may be that of women; in another, it may be the perspectives on political community that nations or empires left out by suppressing the stories of the lives, families and social groups that came before them. These are all ways of putting questions to archives and discovering that they have no answer, because such exclusions were hard-wired into them.
What does literature do? It highlights perspectives that are forgotten, silenced or marginalised. It can force you, for example, to ask: ‘What if you looked at the world through the eyes of a woman who lives under an empire, and whose identity, if we can use that term, is marked by the fluidity of cultures? Someone who then in a world of nation-states becomes a permanent outsider?’ The outsider becomes a vantage point from which you can always raise different questions on belonging from the ones that our existing political order forces upon us.
Maybe that is one of the things that turning to life-writing has allowed you to do—to embrace this contradictory symphony of perspectives that is otherwise difficult to sustain in an academic monograph.
It’s very difficult to do that in academic writing. Literary scholars are surely much more aware of this than philosophers, because philosophers are always after the truth as the end point of their work—they start with doubt, then want to reach clarity. Historians and literary scholars, I feel, are much more at ease with clashing, multiple perspectives. I’m somewhere in between these disciplinary positions: I want to embrace the perspectives, but I don’t want to say that perspective is all there is. Rather, I want to say that some perspectives are more inclusive than others. That’s where the book, and all my work, sits—in the tension between multiple perspectives and a singular truth—and all I’m trying to do is navigate it.
It sounds to me that this tension is going to define your work for the rest of your life.
Yes, I think you might be right. Writing literature forced me to question my philosophical position. I’ve said before that if you want to write convincing literary characters, you can’t write them from a single perspective. You have to embrace their point of view. As with the Nazi character in Indignity, you have to learn to think like him—to be him—to write him convincingly.
Yes, and that’s also because he, Gustav, is not a consistent person.
Yes, absolutely—most people are not consistent in their lives.
Indeed. So when readers learn of that strikingly humane offer he makes at the end of the narrative to Nini, they’re startled, because that gesture is not consistent with anything he has done before. But that capacity for inconsistency is precisely what makes us human.
Yes, exactly. Philosophy tries to help us sort things out, but life is seldom like that, and I tried very hard to show this in Indignity. My grandmother is supposed to be the hero of the story, but there are moments when she makes tragic mistakes. The reader needs to see someone who wants to do the right thing but ends up making terrible judgement calls all the same.
Yes. Nini says at that point that she has not changed as a person, but the story is actually about her changing.
Absolutely.
She is not someone who is consistent herself, but is able to tell you what consistency looks like.
What you’ve said is very important, because people can only model consistency when they’re in a pedagogic mode. I say this at some point about her—that maybe this is all a story she told me for my own sake. She gave me the story of her life to teach me the value of being consistent. That’s what we do with our children whenever we are in pedagogic mode.
Or with our students.
Or students. Exactly.
But then you also have to say, ‘This is me being pedagogic, but I can’t be consistent all the time, and neither can you.’ That’s a difficult message, both for our children and for our students.
Exactly, which is why I think literature is the only place where you can simultaneously inhabit contradiction and exhibit consistency. Do you know what I mean? The work as a whole is consistent, but it is so because it inhabits contradiction.
States that cannot tolerate contradiction also find it hard to tolerate literature—or philosophy, for that matter.
Yes, exactly. But this may also explain why, despite the censorship of totalitarian societies for example, one can still find even in those societies works of brilliant literature that exhibit a kind of internal freedom.
Speaking of states, one of my favourite moments in Indignity is when Nini encounters the severed ears of dogs kept lovingly in a bureaucrat’s filing cabinet. She is there for her citizenship papers and sees ‘a cascade of severed dogs’ ears’ spilling out. The clerk carefully picks and caresses them with a ‘gentle touch … appearing to convey the fragility and dignity of the state’. This is brilliant, because you manage to show that this man is not faking tenderness or solemnity—he is utterly sincere. Tell us why you thought his feelings were about the ‘dignity of the state’. What makes that kind of ‘dignity’ possible?
I’m so glad you like that episode—it’s also one of my favourite chapters in the book. I tried to capture what I think is the essence of bureaucracy, which is about giving individuals a permanence beyond their immediate existence. It’s about creating a system of rules that we—as outsiders, and in most cases critics of bureaucracy—think of as impersonal and inhuman. But for bureaucrats it’s the other way round: you exist because of the system. You are recognised, often, through slips of paper, through records.
For a modern state to be a state, it needs to reduce life to the bare essentials of a birth certificate, a public health insurance number. For people to become a population, this paper trail is essential, and the paper trail also becomes the life of the people who build the systems and enforce the rules. I wrote this chapter because it was the moment when the Albanian state emerged from the ashes of an imperial order. The popular narrative of such moments of independence usually tells of heroes, patriots, glory, language and so on. But if the new state is to be recognised, it needs documents and records—it can’t do what a state is supposed to do, like provide public health, roads and security, without them. That might sound mundane, but it is also the manifestation of what the state’s bureaucrats call the dignity of people, and it is they who run the offices that guarantee it. So, although a lot of my writing is about the absurdities of bureaucracy, it is also about the sincerity of bureaucrats. It matters that there is a bureaucrat who embodies the dignity of the state.
When you were recently in India, did you go to any of the government offices?
No, but I can imagine it’s quite similar.
I’m telling you, you could lift your description of the Albanian bureaucrat’s office word for word and apply it to India. Anyone who has grown up in India will tell you that at some point in their lives they have witnessed or experienced this weird, jarring clash of different kinds of dignity: the dignity of someone queuing to acquire a document assaulted by another person whose own sense of dignity is wrapped up in producing that document.
Yes, totally. The person becomes the role, and they know it. It doesn’t matter what they think as individuals—whether what they’re doing is fair or unfair. Their mindset is something like: ‘I’m not supposed to be an individual here. I’m just supposed to be the rule, embody it and show you what it’s supposed to be.’ On the other hand—and I don’t know how you think about this—there’s something about new states, where the functionaries seem a bit more aware of this. There’s a level of reflexivity in the bureaucrat that you don’t find in older states.
I grew up in India three decades after the country’s independence, and what you call the ‘dignity of the state’ was everywhere, even though it frequently had extremely oppressive outcomes. I left India in the mid-1990s, but I’d say that even then the experience of Nini you describe was fairly common. I’m glad you loved writing that chapter, because it captures a very specific and yet very widespread human experience with real precision.
That’s fascinating. It really is worth being mindful of both these kinds of dignity: on the one hand, there’s the human individual the system is for; on the other, once the system has become a system, it cannot think of itself in ways that are not systemic. As a writer, you need to be able to see both sides—the point of view of the bureaucrats and officers, and what they cannot see as bureaucrats and officers.
Yes. That’s why I love that moment when the bureaucrat caresses the severed ears—you’re not laughing at him, or simply horrified by him. You’re taking his emotions seriously.
Yes, exactly.
My sense was that you did a lot more research for Indignity than for Free, because, as you say, you were under lockdown in Berlin when you wrote Free. On the other hand, you were also writing about memories and stories that were not your own, so you had to imagine them vividly. How did you square that with your research?
I found I was doing a different kind of research. There was research on my grandmother and the documents about her. But when I decided to fictionalise parts of her life, because of the gaps in the archive, she became this generic character representing an entire era, and I was doing research into material that wasn’t about her at all—reading diaries and letters by other women, women’s magazines, diplomatic documents and memoirs. The character of the doctor, for example, is based entirely on memoirs of Holocaust survivors. The material on the cemetery in Salonika is all based on archival research and historical debates around the fate of the Jewish community of Salonica. So even the ‘fictional’ parts of the book are never purely fictional—they draw on historical sources that are not about my grandmother but that add a different perspective.
Or simply from your grandmother’s memory?
Yes. Sometimes my grandmother’s memory prompted the questions I needed to ask. For example, why was Jewish life in Salonika so important to me? I remember asking her why she spoke Italian, and she said, ‘Oh, I speak Italian because I speak Spanish.’ Then I asked her why she spoke Spanish. She explained that it wasn’t quite Spanish but Ladino, because she’d grown up with Jewish boys in her Salonika neighbourhood, boys she’d gone to a French school with. But that’s all she told me. Later, reconstructing her life, I read several Ladino newspapers of the period for example, as well as how the Jews of Salonika were portrayed in the Greek press of the Twenties and Thirties. I imagined the dialogues and characters, often driven by a question I found in my memories of her, though most of the time it was just a tiny glimmer that led me into this world. I ran with it, and went down a lot of rabbit holes besides. The leeches episode is one example: at some point I started researching the leech trade between Salonika and the Ottoman Empire, and ended up studying how leeches are produced in factories in Wales today.
There’s your next book—leech factories in Wales.
Leech factories in Wales, yes. I just try to understand how things work, because if I don’t, I can’t write about it.
You talked about people being inconsistent. I felt Dr Elias was the only character in your book who is consistent in his faith in human beings—one of those people you occasionally meet in a Dostoevsky novel, a counterpoint to everyone else, who holds to his creed to the bitter end.
Yes, although he starts by saying it matters how you live, and ends by saying what really matters is how you die. But it’s consistent all the same, because deep down he knows he is collecting evidence from the Jewish cemetery not just for the sake of the dead, but to connect the living to them. He understands that this connection is what makes cultures endure, and that you cannot really separate the two.
Would you say he’s the most dignified character in the book?
Yes, I suppose that’s true. But maybe for that reason he’s also the most artificial character—a model.
He is an incredibly moving character despite that.
It’s true that he conveys one of the book’s core messages very well: that it doesn’t matter what you remember, it matters how you remember.
I felt he was a moral compass, not just for the readers but for you—for the kind of work you see writing to be.
Yes, it’s true, very true. Elias was a discovery for me, because you discover how and what you think as you write. At one point Elias says, ‘For me, a good citizen is a good human’, and I feel the same. But I also feel conflicted, because I think that’s so obvious, almost banal.
You said earlier you don’t want to surrender to nihilism, and maybe sometimes one returns to the banal to keep nihilism at bay.
Yes. I don’t know how you think about this.
I read Free three years ago and loved it, because the 1990s played out in analogous but also strangely different ways in your Albania and my India. That moment at the beginning, when you remember hugging Stalin’s statue, felt like a moment of kinship to me—in Kolkata, we did all kinds of strange things with Stalin’s statues.
Wow. That’s incredible.
Indignity made me feel close to your grandmother. I could imagine her being friends with mine, swapping stories about partition, about being ‘displaced’, about being refugees.
That’s so interesting. The other thing about grandmothers who’ve lived through these traumas is that they refuse to be victims—which is striking, given our current discussions about historical injustice and the status of victim when discussing responsibilities of current generations. I feel my grandmother really resisted that. She did not want to be seen as a victim: she insisted that throughout her life she remained an agent.
We have stories to swap about our grandmothers, but I want to move towards concluding our conversation with a final reflection. Your writing made me think about how the ideas of dignity and freedom have become, in large parts of the world today, the calling cards of authoritarians of all types. Putin, Modi, Trump, Netanyahu and others all raise slogans of dignity and freedom to dismantle democracy and attack populations. Your wager is that we can resist such authoritarian co-option by exercising our imagination. But oligarchs and dictators can be very imaginative in their pursuit of power. How confident are you about our imagination rescuing us from them?
I’m only confident insofar as the exercise of imagination is connected to a moral aspiration defined in a way that is neither closed nor exclusionary. This is why I’m interested in the dialogue between Kant and Schiller, where Kant emphasised a moral way of thinking about the category of the human, and Schiller argued that this thinking was embodied in the work of art. There’s a great deal packed into that, and I try to be very careful in unpacking it. You can’t just say ‘this is what art should do’, because then it becomes propaganda and loses its aesthetic function. But equally, art cannot bypass morality—it needs to keep a wary eye on it, the moral understood as universally and comprehensively as possible, across space and time. If imagination is connected to the moral in this way, then I’m confident about its redemptive possibilities.
Would that universal morality include non-humans as well as humans?
Yes, absolutely—but it would do so in a way that recognises what is distinctive about human reflexive capacities. I think you can tell a story about nature that is very comprehensive while still retaining human agency. Nature and history always go together and co-create: every phenomenon we call ‘natural’ emerges out of historical processes. I’m confident there’s a story to tell about non-humans that is also clear about what is distinctive about humans.
Did you get a lot of blowback for Indignity?
Not so much—I think it actually helped clarify a lot of things that Free had left ambiguous. It has more detail than Free on what I thought about state socialism, surveillance and so on. It was more that it was such hard work. I’ve had a lot of joy from this conversation, because it’s wonderful when people get what I was trying to do after all the historical work and the effort to combine archival research with literature and fiction. In the case of Free, the story was set in a more recent past and it was linear. With Indignity, there’s a very polarised audience—some people say, ‘Why do we have the final reveal?’ ‘Is it a book of facts or is it fiction?’ ‘History or literature?’ For me, that ambiguity needed to be preserved, and it’s the whole reason for writing the book the way I did.
Without that final moment, there is no book, because it explodes everything you think is going to happen. I’m not going to spoil it for future readers. Lea, thank you very much for your time. It has been a joy to speak to you, and I am looking forward to your next book already.
It’s such a pleasure for me as well. Thank you so much for reading the books so carefully.