On the Right to Beauty

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Image courtesy of CCCB.

Writers Zadie Smith and Édouard Louis will be talking about the ambivalence of beauty, the promises it embodies and the tensions it creates. Is beauty a shared experience or an unequally distributed privilege? Who has a right to it? Can art and literature, in their quest for beauty, help us to imagine other forms of attention and recognition of the other?

The literature of Zadie Smith and Édouard Louis opens up a space to think about the tensions and possibilities of the idea of ​​beauty, and its relationship with justice. Both see beauty as a deeply political concept that is run through by race, social class and power relations. In the work of Édouard Louis, beauty is often linked to a privilege reserved for those who are not subject to exploitation and violence, but it is also seen as a possible force for emancipation. For Zadie Smith, it is a practice of attention: a way to remove ourselves from the center and open up to the reality of others by training ourselves in the form of attention that justice requires.

Zadie Smith is the author of On Beauty (Penguin Books, 2006), a novel that explores the contradictions between aesthetics and morality in a context run through by race, social class and ideology. In her latest collection of essays, Dead and Alive (Hamish Hamilton, 2025), Smith extends these concerns to art, cinema, the defense of fiction and the politics of the commons. Édouard Louis’s narrative work is marked by a critical approach to class, inequality and injustice. In Monique Escapes (Harvill Secker, 2026), he tells a moving autobiographical story about the relationship with his mother and the material and social conditions of liberation from a life marked by violence and precariousness.

Event will be held in Catalan, Spanish and English with simultaneous translation from English to Catalan.

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