★Rights sold: Italian.
★A philosophical manifesto that challenges the tyranny of productivity and reclaims the intrinsic value of life in its rest and uselessness.
★This book is thought-provoking and easy to understand. It requires no prior knowledge of philosophy yet offers rich references for more professional readers.
★This book combines literary essays with incisive insights, making a unique contribution to contemporary critiques of work and capitalism - aligning with the views of thinkers like Jenny Odell while also constructing a distinctive, modern and thought-provoking perspective.

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things." Emma Goldman's famous declaration captures her vision of anarchism not just as a political movement but as a philosophy of life—one that embraces beauty, pleasure, and enjoyment as essential to human existence.

Inspired by Goldman, Lafargue, and Hannah Arendt’s critique of reducing politics to mere economics, Juan Evaristo Valls’ essay emerges as a fresh and compelling voice, proposing a new way of inhabiting the world—one that values life for its beauty rather than its utility. With luminous and combative prose, he defends fundamental "lazy rights"—the right to laziness, to strike, to retirement, to literature, and to disconnection— not as privileges granted by the system, but as radical acts of resistance against capitalist alienation and expressions of true autonomy. These are the “beautiful things”: those that serve no purpose yet sustain us.

Both thought-provoking and accessible, this book requires no prior philosophical knowledge yet offers a wealth of references for more specialized readers. Blending literary prose with sharp essayistic insight, it stands as a singular contribution to contemporary critiques of work and capitalism—aligning with thinkers like Jenny Odell while forging a uniquely modern and provocative perspective.

“Life is a party that ends one day,” sings Bad Bunny. But my impression is that our time on Earth is nothing more than the sum of preparations for a party that never arrives, a joy that is constantly postponed: we spend the whole day in the existential storeroom planning a celebration we systematically delay. In the worst case, our days become an endless, suffocating party that never ends, dragging us along to the rhythm of tachycardia, endlessly deferring the joy of rest. Whether in the preparations for a perpetually postponed party or in the mandatory celebration of neoliberalism, there is horror, not beauty. In both cases, what reigns is the death drive—the banquet of destruction. Emma knew this when she said that beautiful things are not a luxury, but a necessity—like poetry was for Audre Lorde.”

Juan Evaristo Valls Boix is an emerging voice in contemporary thought, a writer and professor of Philosophy of Culture at the Complutense University of Madrid.He has taught Aesthetics and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Barcelona and at BAU, University Centre of Arts and Design, and has been a Margarita Salas postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.
His work focuses on the poetics of inoperativity, the rejection of work, and the politics of desire within a critique of neoliberal subjectivity, with particular attention to affect theory and contemporary French philosophy.
He has published essays and academic monographs on philosophy, culture, and politics, including Giorgio Agamben: Politics Without Work (2020), Metaphysics of Laziness (2022), and Suely Rolnik: Decolonizing the Unconscious (2024). He has also translated key works such as Conflictual Aesthetics by Oliver Marchart, Anarchafeminist Manifesto by Chiara Bottici, and Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography by Joakim Garff. He is currently working on the translation of Against World Literature by Emily Apter.