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February 27, 2005
Goya was an enthusiastic supporter of the Enlightenment and of the liberalisation of the economy and society. He depicted the intellectual and political revolution as a brilliant, omnipotent light that would illuminate humanity's destiny and cast the demons that brutalised human existence into the fiery pit from which they would never again arise.
However, Goya's 'Sleep of Reason produces monsters' from his 1796 Los Caprichos series is ambiguous. It represents an intellectual---the artist himself----is "asleep" at his desk, surrounded by cats and bats and a clear-eyed lynx. The etching is within the frame of the Enlightenment and it is unclear whether Goya means that the absence of reason breeds monsters or that reason is itself a kind of sleep. 
The man of reason is beset by demons that haunt and assault him---is subject to the darknes of a swirling maelstrom of stupidities and evils, such as witchcraft. The nightmare continues to hold us in its grip.
What if the very darkness that is to illuminated is also the source of much life, imagery and passion? Could not the monsters disguise themselves with the finery of liberty, reason and justice?
In looking at the image I recalled my wariness about Bataille's celebration of excess, violence and sacrifice. Are these the demons that haunt the enlightened man of reason?
I then recalled the aristocratic de Sade, that liberatine villain concerned with the shocking and scandalous and the transgression of conventions. Can de Sade and Goya be seen as precursors to Bataille? Did not Goya strike out against convention to render the sensational and the shocking: robbery and murder, adultery and rape, cannibalism.
I then returned to reading Klossowski's Sade, Me Neighbour. I last looked at this text here, which was followed by Joe's post here, and then mine here about the Enlightenment-Sade-Nietzsche-fascism linkage.
I then came across some comments by Alphonse van Worden about de Sade:
"Here is The Sadien project - to shock, to scandalise, to pulverize conventions, to expose and refute categories - is trapped in the already established conflation of the aristocracy, typified by the liberatine villain, with the Shocking and Scandalous and Unconstrained by conventions, playing wantonly with the categories of its own creation. Seeking to break out of this pattern at the far end - to find the outermost boundary of that type and cross it (combine adultery, sodomy, sacrilege, incest - but neglecting counterfeiting or rigging the stock market, albeit perhaps out of absent-mindedness) - Sade's lurch at liberty fails. Perhaps it is a lack of imagination. Perhaps the project's purpose was spectacular failure. But a scandalous and shocking Marquis de Sade, descendant of Petrarca's Laura, would probably have stood a better chance of escaping his fated impunity heading for the other door.
The lack of imagination retuns us to Goya, for reason without imagination produces monsters.
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Goya's ambivalent relationship to the enlightenment can be seen in many of his works, including many other prints from Los Caprichos. The best discussion i know of is Janis A Tomilson's Goya In The Twighlight of Enlightenment.