Irony of Confinement
In discussing the Ship of Fools, a space in which forms of “unreason” were confined, Foucault considers the irony of the allegory:
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. (11)
On the one hand, the mad seem to be the most free: the water is wide and expansive, unlike the limitations of those of us confined to land. But on the other hand, the mad are confined, stuck on this small ship in the vast ocean. For Foucault, this symbolized conceptions of madness more generally. Madness is thought of as something that is free from human constraint, because of the ways in which the mad are out of touch with reality or social obligation. But this freedom from order needs to be contained or confined, precisely because of its threat to social order.
Irony of Civilization
There is a paradox at the heart of Foucault’s title, Madness and Civilization. On the one hand, madness is usually defined as something outside of civilization. Normal, civilized people are sane, while the mad are those who are uncivilized or fail to understand and act in accordance to civilized norms. At the same time, however, Foucault notes how people during the period he studies began to think of madness as something that was caused by civilization. This is because increasing scientific knowledge and modernization, for instance, alienated people from their own bodies and lives, leading to the experience of madness. This strange situation, in which madness seems both outside of civilization and caused by civilization, is complex and paradoxical, and Foucault’s study is about how this irony develops.
Irony of Liberation
A theme throughout Madness and Civilization is that history isn’t always progressive. In other words, things don’t always get better or more civilized or more humane. Here, Foucault describes the shift from the Renaissance to the classical age:
By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voices the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed. (38)
In the Renaissance, representations of madness were everywhere. They were central to Shakespeare’s plays, for instance. But in the period that follows, madness is muted or removed from expression. Thus, historical movement is a movement away from a “liberation” or expression of different kinds of voices.
Irony of Humanism
Related to the previous irony, Foucault discusses the ironic nature of the “birth of the asylum.” This creation of spaces exclusively for the mad might have seemed at first a more humane treatment of the mentally ill, giving them a space separate from criminals, for instance. Foucault argues somewhat the opposite:
We see how the political critique of confinement functioned in the eighteenth century. Not in the direction of a liberation of the mad; nor can we say that it permitted a more philanthropic or a greater medical attention to the insane. On the contrary, it linked madness more firmly than ever to confinement, and this by a double tie: one which made madness the very symbol of the confining power and its absurd and obsessive representative within the world of confinement; the other which designated madness as the object par excellence of all the measures of confinement. (227)
Here, it is rather the prisoners who need to be protected from the mad, rather than the other way around. Mental illness was given its special places and forms of treatment not to treat the mad more humanely, but rather to isolate them from other humans they were perceived to be a danger to.
