In 1799, Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos. Among his engravings was one destined to stand the test of time: a man sleeps, leaning over a table, whilst owls, bats and creatures of the night emerge from behind him. At the bottom, a phrase: ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’.

More than a century later, from a fascist prison, Antonio Gramsci wrote about another moment teeming with unsettling creatures. His phrase has come down to us in a version that speaks of an old world dying, a new world slow to be born, and monsters appearing in the chiaroscuro. Gramsci, in fact, did not write exactly that. He spoke of a crisis in which the old dies whilst the new cannot be born, and in whose interregnum the most varied ‘morbid phenomena’ occur.

The unfaithfulness of the translation, however, produced an unexpected fidelity. Someone transformed Gramsci’s morbid phenomena into monsters and, in doing so, unwittingly brought the Sardinian thinker closer to the Aragonese painter.

This coincidence deserves more than mere curiosity.

Goya and Gramsci lived more than a hundred years apart, but both experienced moments when the promise of rationality seemed to lose its ability to bring order to the world. Goya lived through the Age of Enlightenment, with its faith in reason, science and progress, yet he also witnessed the wars, superstitions, absolutism and violence that coexisted with that promise. Gramsci witnessed another crisis: that of the European order as it weathered the First World War, the subsequent social upheavals and the rise of fascism.

Monsters appear in both landscapes.

There is a temptation to read Goya as though he were speaking solely of the individual: a man abandons his rational vigilance, falls asleep, and his unconscious becomes populated by creatures. But Los Caprichosspeak persistently of society. Its witches, donkeys, friars, dandies and old women possess individual bodies, whilst that which they embody — ignorance, superstition, servility, abuse, fanaticism — circulates collectively.

Goya depicts wave-like phenomena as particles.

The monster has a body. Monstrosity, on the other hand, spreads.

A character allows us to depict that which lacks a face. Superstition has no nose; fanaticism has no hands; collective fear has no eyes. The artist must give them a body to make them visible. To then confuse that body with the phenomenon would be to mistake the representation for that which it represents.

Gramsci, in a certain sense, carries out the opposite movement. His interest is directed towards the field. He seeks to understand the conditions that allow certain historical phenomena to emerge. When one order loses the capacity to organise collective experience and another has not yet managed to establish a new hegemony, an interregnum opens.

The monster then ceases to be an explanation and becomes a symptom.

This reversal is particularly important when we seek to understand periods of crisis. Our gaze tends to focus on the individual figures: the tyrant, the demagogue, the fanatic, the strongman. Their faces capture our attention and offer a reassuring explanation. If the monster is the cause of monstrosity, it would suffice to eliminate it to restore normality.

But what happens if we reverse the relationship?

Perhaps it is not the monster that warps the field. Perhaps it is a certain curvature of the field that makes the monster’s trajectory possible.

Individuals matter, of course. They act, decide, cause harm, govern. But their historical emergence requires conditions that precede them: accumulated fears, humiliations, inequalities, frustrations, technological transformations, the loss of institutional legitimacy, cultural shifts, new forms of communication. A multitude of interferences ultimately alters the geometry within which societies think and act.

What seemed inadmissible yesterday begins to seem debatable.

Then, possible.

Finally, reasonable.

And here Goya’s statement reveals a particular depth. Goya did not write that the absence of reason produces monsters.

He wrote ‘the sleep of reason’.

The difference is enormous.

When someone sleeps, they do not cease to exist. Sleep is not the absence of consciousness, but another of its possible states. During sleep, memories, images, desires and fears continue to operate, but their relationships change. Causalities that are impossible whilst awake take on a strange sense of reality. Sleep even possesses its own coherence.

Perhaps something similar occurs with societies.

Unreason would not, then, be that which begins where reason ends.

Unreason is a state of reason.

A society can retain universities, scientists, courts, ministries, statistics, engineers and extraordinarily sophisticated technologies whilst profoundly changing the way in which it rationally organises its experience.

The modern monster may even be an excellent administrator.

The history of the twentieth century compels us to abandon any naïve identification between rationality and goodness. Some of the greatest atrocities were carried out through efficient bureaucracies, legal systems, advanced technologies, mass media and complex industrial organisations. Instrumental reason could function impeccably even as the reason governing its ends had changed state.

Here Goya meets Gramsci, and behind them both, Hegel looms.

Unreason ceases to be the absolute exterior of reason. It appears as one of its possibilities, a form born within its own contradictions. Nor does the monster necessarily come from outside. It may have remained latent within the very order it later seeks to destroy.

That is why interregna are dangerous.

When a historical framework loses its stability, trajectories become uncertain. That which remained on the margins may shift towards the centre. The exceptional seeks to become the norm. Old words take on new meanings and others, which seemed buried, return to everyday vocabulary.

Perhaps we are living through one of those moments.

Not because monsters return punctually every hundred years. History lacks such a clock. But our times show signs of a profound transformation of the field: institutions losing authority, technologies altering our relationship with the truth, algorithms fragmenting the public sphere, persistent inequalities, wars that seemed to belong to another era, uncertainty about the future, and a growing difficulty in constructing a shared experience of reality.

It would be far too simplistic to pick out a few contemporary figures and label them monsters.

Goya and Gramsci seem to be asking us for something more difficult.

To look at the wave rather than the particle.

To ask ourselves what desires, fears, frustrations and ways of thinking are circulating through our societies; what interferences are reshaping the field; what things that were unthinkable yesterday are beginning to make sense today.

Because by the time the monster finally takes on a face, a significant part of the event has already taken place.

The field has changed.

Reason has changed state.

Perhaps that is why the decisive question of our time is not who our monsters are.

It is another, far more uncomfortable one:

What state of our reason is making them possible?