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History of European Ideas 30 (2004) 109119

Counter-rational reason: Goyas instrumental

negotiations of esh and world
Antonio La! zaro-Reboll*
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Abstract
How do Goyas representations of the body disrupt the Enlightenments congurations of
the corporeal? If for eighteenth-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty and
the limit of what can and may be represented, then Goyas panoply of monsters provides a
way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the body and its
functions within culture. In his work there is a recuperation of those elements that seem to lie
outside the ken of the Enlightenment project: physicality, animality, hybridity, the grotesque,
the popular; a recognition of the animal nature of the body and the products of bodily
impulses and forces. A rethinking of the body would incorporate an understanding of its role
as a physical and social phenomenon in the constitution of the subject. Following on from
Paul Ilies concept of counter-rational Reason, which he denes as the opposite of a uniform
centre of rationality in representative thought, the rst half of my paper will consider Goyas
problematization of representation. My analysis of a selection of drawings from the collection
Los Caprichos (1799) will focus not just on the representation of bodies in the painters work
but on his exploration of bodies in their material varietycongurations of modes of
constructing the body. This examination of Goyas prolic pictorial negotiations and
adaptations of esh and world will draw upon contemporary approaches to theorizing the
body, namely the theories of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz.
r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The year 1793 is generally regarded as a turning-point in the work of the Spanish
painter Francisco Jose! de Goya (17461828). Following his near-fatal illness the
previous year, Goyas art assumed signicant technical and thematic shifts as he
embarked on what Paul Ilie describes as an increasingly less rational and more

*Corresponding author. Department of Spanish, School of European Culture and Languages,

University of Kent, Cornwallis Building, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK.
E-mail address: a.lazaro-reboll@kent.ac.uk (A. L!azaro-Reboll).
0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.008

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demonically imaginative course of paintings and engravings, (p. 122).1 Drawing on

the work of such critics as Edith Helman, Javier E. Pe! rez Sa! nchez, and Eleanor
Sayre, among others, who contextualise Goyas life and work within enlightened
circles, Ilie pushes the discursive boundaries beyond the literary and ideological
world of the n-de-sie" cle in an attempt to unlayer what he terms the faces or
masks of reason, counter-rational reason, or simply Unreason [Ilie, 1995,
p. 1].2 Culling contradictory images and paradigms from natural historians and
philosophers, physiologists, and both prominent and marginal thinkers of the age,
Ilies interdisciplinary study of 18th-century culture and science aims to dis-locate the
periods central unifying discourse.
The 18th-centurys grand metaphor of continuity took Reason as its guarantor.
The belief in a continuous universe and the belief in cognitive continuityhuman
perception and knowledgeunderlay the spirit of the age. Whether the Great Chain
of Being, the clock, or the tree of knowledge, universal, empirical, or cognitive
metaphors tended to obscure the structural discontinuity of the universe and to
represent the unbroken intelligibility of a universe composed of perfectly tting
parts, (p. 14).3 Ilies argument in The Age of Minerva: Counter-Rational Reason in
the Eighteenth Century [Ilie, 1995] and The Age of Minerva: Cognitive Discontinuities
in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Ilie, 1995), is that 18th-century Reason displayed an
alter ego capable of protean powers [Ilie, 1995, p. 18], and that a counter-rational
discourse pervaded throughout the century. The mythic gure Minerva, Goddess of
Wisdom, a complex, multivalent symbol unobtrusive and all-pervasive in the visual
arts in France and Spain, yet hardly alluded to in current 18th-century studies, is, for
Ilie, symptomatic of the centurys failure to reach its ideal of continuity [Ilie, 1995,
p. 4]. In ancient mythology, Minerva wove a tapestry; regarded as the supreme
weaver of knowledge, keeper of secrets, only Minerva knew how to unite
contradictions into a harmonious whole. The spinster Arachne, after a failed
attempt to steal the secret of Minervas weaving science and dethrone the Goddess,
was turned into a spider. Minerva as the perfect weaver of tapestries was an excellent
emblem of the centurys pursuit of a Universal Language, the uninterrupted thread
of wisdom [Ilie, 1995, p. 6] uniting artists, philosophers, and scientists. But Minerva,
iconographically ambiguous in Ilies analyses of Spanish culture, also gures as the
simultaneous, subtextual disruption of the Enlightenment project. Taking his cue
from post-structuralist inquiry, in particular the works of Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida, what interests Ilie is both the disruption of the traditional methods
1

P. Ilie, The Age of Minerva: Counter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth-Century, University of

Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1995.
2
Edith Helmans (Trasmundo de Goya, Madrid, np, 1963) seminal work Trasmundo de Goya (1963)
dened Goya as a painter-philosopher. Following this tradition, Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment
(1989), co-edited by Alfonso E. P!erez S!anchez and Eleanor Sayre (Goya and the Spirit of the
Enlightenment, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989), was the result of an exhibition and catalogue that
investigates the relationship between Goya and the Enlightenment, and places the artist among the
progressive statesmen and intellectuals, the ilustrados.
3
P. Ilie, The Age of Minerva: Cognitive Discontinuities in Eighteenth-Century Thought, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1995.

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of organizing knowledge and human perception and the supplementarity of

alternative traditions that evolved side by side with Minervan reason; in particular,
the symbolic and social implications of the absence or vanishing of Minerva in
Goyas 1799 etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The pertinence of
Ilies reading for my own study lies precisely in his concern with the displacement of
Minervan reason, or its re-conguration in Goyas Capricho, which Ilie refers to as a
paradigmatic statement of a crisis in the perception of reality [Ilie, 1995, p. 17]. My
aim in this article is to examine Ilies theory at work more broadly within Goyas
corpus, mainly the Caprichos, a collection of etchings published in 1799. Arguably,
Goya uses a visual medium to problematize the central Enlightenment motif of
visibility and transparency, hence of binarized thought, by representing what
Elizabeth Grosz refers to in another context as the subordinated, negative, or
excluded term body as the unacknowledged condition of the dominant term, reason
(p. 32).4 Given Ilies parallel between the mortal Arachne and the Enlightenments
equally awed aspiration to absolute knowledge, I shall argue that it is the body that
Reason traps in its tenuous and arbitrary web.5
Let us turn, then, to Ilies comparative analysis of the capricho The Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters (Fig. 1) and Goyas earlier (1798) portrait of the
Spanish minister of justice Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos.
Whereas in the Portrait of Jovellanos Minervas political and civic attributes act
as an icon for the politician and philosophers Enlightenment ideals, the
displacement of the goddess in the capricho is represented iconographically by the
owl. The idealized form of Minerva is not only recongured, that is, substituted by
that other gure or conventional emblem of rationality/wisdom, the owl, but
disgured both in the owls monstrous reproductionthe quartet of owlsand by
the taxonomical monstrosity of the bats that defy rational understanding. The bat,
neither bird nor mammal, upsets the paradigm of continuity and its taxonomical
groundwork [Ilie, 1995, p. 61].6 The appearance of three additional owls behind the
human gure evokes conventional Minervan attributespractical Reason, sage
guardian of kingdoms, shield against the irrational.7 At the same time, it evokes
Ancient philosophy and hermetic and hyerophantic cults. The detailed analysis of
the partitioned shield of the goddess in the Portrait of JovellanosIlie reminds us
of its indecipherability for art historiansindicates too her bipartite character: half
of it depicts a warrior, the other half an indecipherable oval of darkness with arcane
4
E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1994. Grosz is not referring
explicitly to the Enlightenment conguration of the body, nor is she commenting on Goyas work; her
assessment of the neglect of the body within Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist
theory is however useful for my argument here.
5
Together, the spinning subject the web, and the clasped object form a continuity of tactile attachments
from the inner world to the outer one [Ilie, 1995, p. 143].
6
Ilie (1995) devotes Chapter 2 (Metamorphosis of the Bat) to the myths, emblems, icons, literary
tradition, and scientic data surrounding bats.
7
As part of her multiple roles, Ilie [Ilie, 1995, p. 41] surveys the different representations of Minerva
within Spain: defender of the Spanish Church, synonym for spiritual and imperial hegemony, protectress
of enlightened despots.

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Fig. 1. Francisco Jos!e de Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799).

resonances. Whether her dualism and ambiguous symbolism signies a perversion

of rational wisdom or a knowledge that is more occult and perhaps more sinister
than that the awakened mind knows by daylight [Ilie, 1995, p. 40], we cannot say;
only Minerva could bring together Reason and Unreason, order and chaos.
Goyas imagery problematizes the Enlightenments assumptions of representation
and delves into the problems of human perception and knowledge. In problematizing representation, Goya is undercutting or providing a counter-discourse to
Reason: an insight into a reality that eludes the minds rational eye. Traditionally,
the Caprichos have been interpreted within the larger movement of the Enlightenment and Neoclassical criticism of rational didacticism. Dictionaries, technical
treatises, manuals, compendia conveyed information cleanly, ordered and classied
reality, and taught people to see the truth in the same way that religious didacticism
taught to see the truth. The collection is seen as an educational tool for attaining
enlightenment, a social critique and satire of the vices and errors of Spanish 18thcentury society. My analysis of two etchings, entitled Back to His Forebear and
And Still They Dont Go, aims to disrupt traditional readings of the Caprichos and

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to suggest Goyas interest in problems of representation and, more specically, in the

representation of bodies and his exploration of their materiality. Goyas alternative
accounts of the body, those monstrous and grotesque bodies, pose a challenge to the
singular, universal model of the Enlightenments self-determined individual, and
seem to me instrumental in bringing back into play Reasons underside, its
demonized other.
Reason, as the central and illuminating faculty of 18th-century philosophy,
permeated all forms of knowledge; its gurative method was violently anatomical,
dissecting appearance, enunciating depth, uncovering the duplicity of the world.
What the truth-claims of modern, rational science concealed was the exorbitance of
its own rhetoric: the fact that the monsters of the mind are a product of reason itself,
a result of its own dreams, of its own excess. For many contemporary commentators,
what Goyas The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters sets up in the ambiguity of its
title, of the human gure, and of the morphologically unclassiable bats circling the
dreamer slumped at his desk, is the paradox of knowledge itself. Deliberately
uncertain, the etchings ambiguity suspends the principle of difference and identity
that marks rational discourse. It reveals the discontinuities and ambiguities in both
the natural world and in the perceptual process. When Reason sleeps, monsters
appear (social, political, moral), but, inversely, the rationalism of the Enlightenment
mind betrays its own necessarily monstrous positioning. Knowledge is contaminated
by an irreducible irrational component at its core: Reason has innite faces, already
imbued and pre-gured by Unreason.
The relationship between body and mind has been a site of continual ideological
and aesthetic conict. In order to rethink and recongure the body, binary
oppositions which divide the body into the mutually exclusive categories of mind
and body [Grosz, 1994, p. 21] must be problematized. The model of binarized
oppositions understands the body as ahistorical, biologically given, and noncultural,
through the repression and the disavowal of its role in the production of knowledge.
In reality, the body is marked by the interaction of the natural and the cultural, by
the particularities of its historical concreteness: the body is itself a cultural, the
cultural, product [Grosz, 1994, p. 21]. As the site where life and thought intersect,
the body challenges the view that the production and evaluation of knowledge
derives from the principles of reason and intelligence. Though intractable, bodies
have suffered both conceptual and actual dismemberments that have placed them at
the service of visual metaphors.
The body is a victim of the Enlightenment project in that it is already secondary to
the mind. In the age of encyclopedism, the (uniform) human body represented the
organic paradigm of all complex unions (p. 12).8 As a privileged model or model
object, the body acquired the status of keeper of meaning and essential secrets.
Analytic dissection and synthetic reconstruction became an objective standard
against which the body, affective and mutable, was judged. Yet the paradigmatic
anatomical method of the Enlightenment, a violent, adversarial opening up of the
8

B.M. Stafford, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991 (repr. 1997).

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subject, not only created truths but also administered the powers of exclusion and
control. If for 18th-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty and the
limit of what can and may be represented, then Goyas panoply of monsters provides
a way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the
body and its function(s) within culture. Goya dissects the Enlightenment way of
looking at and explaining the body; his representations of the body disrupt
Enlightenments congurations of the corporeal. In his work after 1793 there is a
recuperation of those elements that seem to lie outside the ken of the Enlightenment
project: animality, hybridity, physicality, the grotesque, the popular; a recognition of
the animal nature of the body and of the products of bodily impulses and forces.
The theme of the asinine in the Caprichos, directed to exposing and condemning
the Spanish nobility at the end of the century, lends itself most obviously to a social
and moral reading. Education and ignorance, social abuse and oppression, or the
genealogical obsessions of a sector of the population are among Goyas ostensible
targets in the drawings devoted to the asinine subject. As a metaphorical
representation of popular sayings, No seas burro (Dont be an ass) and el muy
burro (the great oaf) the etching can be understood within a tradition that partakes,
in Teresa Lorenzos words, of the symbols and peculiar logic of Carnival language.9
On the other hand, it depicts in a metaphorical and satirical way how people
understand reality in accordance with their own assumptions. Let us focus on
Capricho 39 (Fig. 2), entitled Asta su Abuelo (Back to His Forebear), resisting
however the invitation to take the literal meanings offered by the manuscript
captions and explanations: This wretched animal has been driven mad by
genealogists and kings at Arms [heraldic ofcers]. He is not the only one and Asses
that pride themselves on their noble lineage are in fact asses back to their most
remote lineage [Pe! rez Sanchez and Sayre, 1989, p. 102].
Such scriptorial pointers do not contain or exhaust the scope of Goyas dispute
with the institutional preoccupations of his time. In particular, I wish to argue that
the 17th-century and early to mid-18th-century concept of representation
(Foucaults classical episteme) is being potentially challenged. The drawings,
preparatory drafts, and nal etching of Capricho 39, which details a mule in human
attire uncomfortably seated in his study reading a book might be linked back to
conventional portraits of contemplative gures in conventional settings for
meditation and reection. The nal version of the drawing, as in several of the
early drafts, depicts the mule looking out towards the viewer. The continuity
between the donkeys eye and the page, between vision and text, is broken by the
momentary pose of the model. The only exception to this pose is the preparatory
drawing of 17971798, in which the anthropomorphic gure, hooves on text as if
reading braille, is shown in prole. This scene of self-absorption, with its hint at the
9
According to T. Lorenzo, p. xciii (Carnival traditions in Goyas Iconic language, in: A.E. P!erez
S!anchez, E. Sayre (Eds.), Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989),
the language of folly, buffoonery, and Carnival remained in the 18th-century the only possible voice to
express a moral judgement freely and without concessions The translation of proverbs or colloquial
expressions into visual forms, then, will have a moral and satirical value.

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Fig. 2. Francisco Jos!e de Goya: Back to His Forebear (1799).

blindness of the reader (the pages of the pictured text are blank), is in keeping with
the theme of ignorant self-assurance running through the compositions. In the (nal)
1799 etching, the book held open to view displays a pictorial taxonomy of asinine
gures. The mimetic relationship established between the pictured reader and the
words in the text corresponds to 18th-century assumptions on the nature of the sign
and signication. It does not only correspond, then, to genealogy in its obsessive
courtly guise of pure lineages and noble roots (the heraldic emblem gured on the
study desk suggests as much), but also to a discursive organization symptomatic of
the logocentric drive towards uncontaminated, unproblematized categories. Like the
bats morphological ambiguity in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the
hybrid creature disrupts the continuity of identiable categories. Identifying itself in
the book, performing the cognitive operation of reading for identication, the
anthropomorphic gure seems assured of the semiotic transparency of language. The
gure of Capricho 39 is looking for sameness and difference which suggests
Foucaults thesis concerning the altered representation of reality in the 18th century

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and the shift from a discourse of resemblance to a discourse of identity and

difference. The humanized donkey, a manifest contradiction, destabilizes the
rational representation of reality; a legible methodology whose organization and
homogeneity portrayed in the monochromatic uniformity and linear disposition of
the asinine gures on the page is coextensive with representation itself. Goyas
altered representations of the body fracture the classical body and parallel in the
same way the cognitive fault-lines detected by Foucault10,11 in both Classical and
Enlightenment mentalities [Ilie, 1995, p. 194].12
Natural science and the language of empiricism was the epistemic ideal of the 18th
century. This resulted in a drive towards biological epitomization, a reductive and
essentialist representation of the body shed of its materiality. It is precisely the
Reasoned corrective of an immutable bodily form that Goya questions. Barbara
Maria Staffords argument that the anatomical gure is turned into a lithic, even
mineralogical specimen is particularly pertinent for the analysis of Goyas Capricho
! no se van (And Still They Dont Go) (Fig. 3), which sets up an
59, Y aun
antagonism between the Enlightenments ideal and its eshly approximation. In the
drawing, a ghoulish assembly of gures is depicted pushing against a huge tombstone
which seems about to crush them.13
The dramatic contrast between the huddled, bent, gures and the sheer diagonal
spine of the stone, suggests the artists dispute with the textual/representational
ideals of the time because the stone calls to mind the Mosaic tablets of stone; the
inscribed letter of the law. Science as a displayed theology, as the reader of the Book
of Nature, might be seen as denying or building over the inchoate mass of human
fallibility. The tombstone might be seen as pronouncing death upon the superstitious
and irrational beliefs in the populace. Open to metaphorical readings, the gures
become embodiments of abstract notions such as death, superstition, or the
supernatural. But these bodies are irremediably physical: Goya recuperates their
bodiliness. My analysis of And still they dont go derives from Julia Kristevas14
concept of abjection in Powers of Horror (1982). The bodily excess of the unsightly
human mass portrayed in this capricho provokes horror and disgust. This reaction is
symptomatic of our cultural inability to accept the bodys materiality, its limits, its
natural cycles and its mortality (p. 91).15 The tombstone acts as a border for those
monstrous gures that threaten to cross it, possibly a moral limit if we are to accept
one of the texts accompanying the etching. The contorted shape of the gure leaning
against the stone struggles against its weight: feet, hands and chest exert all their
10

M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, The Order of Things. An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences,
Gallimard, Paris, 1966 (translated), Routledge, London, 1997 (reprint).
11
P. Ilie, El Templo de Minerva en la Espana del XVIII, Hispanic Review 59 (1991) 123.
12
The Caprichos belong, of course, to a long tradition of poking fun at mans foibles and pretensions.
Thus the gures and themes treated by Goya populate texts of the period.
13
In Spanish the word losa also means burden, which brings into the etching another meaning: the
crushing burden of human mortality.
14
J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.
15
E. Grosz, The body of signication, in: J. Fletcher, A. Benjamin (Eds.), Abjection, Melancholia and
Love, Routledge, London, 1990.

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Fig. 3. Francisco Jos!e de Goya: And Still They Dont Go (1799).

fragile force. An old woman cowers in fear; amidst gaping eyes and mouths, a
convulsing body lies on the grounda corpse? It is as if the bodies had crawled out
from under this rock; yet it is unclear whether the stone is being raisedalong with
the resurrected guresor dropped. There is no epitaph written on this stone, no
! no se van (And Still They
engravings on its surface, but there is a caption: Y aun
Dont Go). Roberto Alcala! Flechas Vampirism in the work of Goya is an example
of a reading of Capricho 59 as a satirical commentary on contemporary beliefs in
vampireshence a reading which takes for granted the resurrection of the gures.16
16
R. Alcal!a Flecha, Vampirism in the Work of Goya, Goya 233 (1993) 258267. See also R. Alcal!a
! General de Aragon,
! Zaragoza,
Flecha, pp. 255257 (Literatura e ideolog!a en el arte de Goya, Diputacion
1988).

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He situates and reads the etching within the periods intellectual and popular
consideration of the vampire in Europe and its reception in Spain in the works of the
Benedictine scholar Feijoo, Jose! Cadalso, and Leandro Ferna! ndez de Morat!n.
According to Alcala! Flecha, the ambiguity of the title might be claried by the titles
of preparatory drafts, La Trampa (The Trap) and Salga lo que saliere (Whatever
May Emerge), which draw attention to the huge slab. This would be a reference to
the belief of cultivated minds in the impossibility of a dead body rising from the
grave and then coming back to it without removing the gravestone. Alcala! Flecha
admits that, although Goyas ultimate intention is out of our reach, the artists point
of departure is the visualization of a graphic joke [Alcala! Flecha, 1993, p. 263].
Goyas etching, then, would be an illustration of this absurd belief. Alcala! Flecha
traces the literature and the cultural ideas of Goyas contemporary milieu in order to
nd a rational and cohesive explanation for the vampiric gures: the origin, the point
of departure, for Capricho 59 would respond to a graphically literal and
metaphorical use of the word vampire in reference to political and religious
classes. To follow this line of argument would be to miss the caprichos interrogation
of representation itself. Alcala! Flechas concern with the genealogy of the work xes
its scope and its boundaries. How are we to view the deliberate ambiguity of the
Goyaesque vampire as well as the caption? The discontinuity between picture and
text is arguably an instance of Reason and its alter-ego Unreason.
The spine of the BookSymbolic order, religious discourse, discursive rectitude,
the scientic lexiconwould bind the body, delimiting its boundaries. Abjection is a
relationship to a boundary and represents what has been jettisoned out of that
boundary, its other side. In Kristevas words, abjection is:
[a] weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignicant, and
which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that,
if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture. (1982, p. 2)
What threatens the clean and properthe paradigm of the clean and proper
bodymust be cast out, excluded. For Kristeva, the symbolic order, and the
acquisition of a sexual and psychical identity within it, can only exist by delimiting
the body. The activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject takes up
his or her proper place in relation to the symbolic. The impossibility of purity is the
paradox of the abject: what you seek to exclude is constitutive of you. In Groszs
words, abjection is a reaction to the recognition of the impossible but necessary
transcendence of the subjects corporeality, and the impure, deling elements of its
uncontrollable materiality [Grosz, 1990, p. 108]. The body is a neglected entity in
that its nature is cleared of the dung of life, and it is divorced from any sense of the
eshed natural body [Stafford, p. 108].
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters provides Ilie with a starting point and a
thread with which to weave his interdisciplinary study of 18th-century culture and
science. If, according to Ilie, the gure of Minerva is anything but transparent, her
disappearance or vanishing brings back the unsightly underside of Reason. Against
the ideal or conscious Minervan form, Goya invokes dreams, superstitions,

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fanaticism, and occultism: the elusive and monstrous subject of irrationality. Goyas
portrayal of the body in its grotesque and monstrous materiality, though generally
read as a satire on the vices of Spanish society, may also, I have argued, be
considered as an antidote to Enlightened congurations and aspirations. As Grosz
has shown, the body has suffered under Reason. By countering Reason and its
modes of representation, the Goyaesque body upsets the frameworks by which
binary thinking conventionally represented the corporeal. Goyas depiction of bodies
as bodies urges us to rethink the body. This rethinking would involve a reconnection
of the formally separated body and mind, and an investigation into the relationship
of the body to its culture. This article takes the rst steps towards an examination of
the Goyaesqueor grotesquebody as the site of that crisis in representation.