The right to beautiful things

PalmNow that summer is starting and the hours are dragging on, the book has come into my hands. The right to beautiful things, by Juan Evaristo Valls Boix. A book that begins by vindicating Emma Goldman and her desire to dance. Goldman championed free love and dance floors, a rebellious anarchism. Feminist movements echo this sentiment: "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." Emma Goldman understands anarchism as a foreign right, the right of everyone to beauty and radiance. A right that frees us from metaphysical burdens and allows us the lightness of being.

Juan Evaristo pulls this thread and, with lucidity, gives us a joyful manifesto that calls for laziness, the idle life, the free city, literature, philosophy, universities as places of useless knowledge. From which to invent a way of being in the world, "like an improvised dance that lasts a long time." Beauty is as important as freedom. In beauty lies the longing for a good life, a post-capitalist desire that escapes obligatory ambition and joy. Evaristo traces a constellation of names that, from Ancient Greece to the present day, focus on the active lifeAristotle, Arendt, Goldman, share the vindication of beautiful things, those that are neither necessary nor useful, the very slow things that make us human. Arendt's diagnosis is well known: economic issues, governed by utility and efficiency, have eaten into the ground of active lifeWe spend our time working, negotiating, repeating sad protocols. It's the exhausting rule of calculating interests, the sovereignty of instrumental rationality. Thought and action, the beginning of something new, a useless and beautiful life, are far removed from that gray cemetery.

Equality, freedom, and justice

The devotion to beauty, the joy of inhabiting the world, are inseparable from equality, freedom, and justice. We must dethrone progress and competitiveness to allow the anarchy of rest and laziness to flourish. Now, to move toward this wild horizon, from the hammock that swings for hours in the middle of a pine forest, with the sea in the background, producing nothing, not even the images that would fill social media, we must first make an ontological shift. We must empty existence of everything that does not belong to it, of everything that blocks attention from the essential question: how do we inhabit the world?

The right to beautiful things requires liberating life from capitalist values. This is not a pipe dream, Juan Evaristo tells us, it is a way to limit the neoliberal government of our lives, a limit that allows us to breathe and gives us the time to be. We must build the material conditions to live joyfully, connected to others through valuable bonds that make room for differences. We must preserve a space for ourselves that is not contaminated by capitalist logic (efficiency, merit, productivity). We must cast off the tyranny of performance and make room for care, for pause, for letting go, for stopping doing.

The only way to truly love one another, "curse and divine," lies through the gift of time, through the nothingness of Sundays, dinners by the sea, early mornings without clocks, open windows and damp sheets, sunny afternoons spent reading. The right to beautiful things.

The only way to "live" is to defend the right to beautiful things, for all the bodies of this wounded world.