ABSTRACT
In 1797, Francisco Goya produced one of his signature prints, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos/The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which implied an antisymmetry between the rational and the monstrous (Fig. 1). However, two centuries later, the decades of World Wars saw the definitive refutation of the inverse: not only is it false that reason excludes monsters, the very operation of rational, quotidian procedures can produce monsters: beings against nature. The operations that produce beings outside nature can themselves be quite ordinary, quotidian, even rational. We can extend our world by amalgamating “monsters” – beings against and therefore outside nature – not by taming them or by exhibiting them in cages, but by enlarging our social, technical, political, epistemic practices to include them. By natural, I will mean that which corresponds to the conceptual understanding scaffolding a suite of common practices about what are the putative entities and substances of the world, and how they interact, an understanding which is sedimented in turn across the experience of structuring, posing, manipulating, and operating with those entities. Francisco Goya, <italic>El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos</italic>, 1797. El Caprichos 43. Google Art Project, Google Cultural Institute. n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2020. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003146858/0962ae3e-954b-4246-b618-a58bac9ac1f5/content/CANG_A_1754023_F0001_PB.tif"/>
