You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO? - But you're already on it, scurrying like vermin, grouping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate (...) and are penetrated; on it we love. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 150). (shrink)

Suggests an open system of psychological exploration to cut through accepted norms of morality, language, and politics.

With a new introduction by the author In this deliciously polemical work, a giant of cultural theory immerses himself in the ideas of a giant of French thought.

The final work of the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze includes essays on such diverse literary figures as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, and others, along with philosophers Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Taken together, these 18 essays--all newly revised or published here for the first time--present a profoundly new approach to literature.

The Oxford Philosophical Texts series consists of authoritative teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy from the ancient world down to modern times. Each volume provides a clear, well laid out text together with a comprehensive introduction by a leading specialist, giving the student detailed critical guidance on the intellectual context of the work and the structure and philosophical important of the main arguments and explain unfamiliar references and terminology, and a full bibliography and index are also (...) included. -/- The series aims to build up a definitive corpus of key texts in the Western philosophical tradition, which will from a reliable and enduring resource for students and teachers alike. -/- Spinoza's Ethics is one of the classical texts of philosophy but is also one of the most difficult to understand because of the author's use of rigorous logical deduction and the geometrical framework within which his ideas are set. In Ethics, he discusses the nature of human beings and the way in which a rational person might live; the nature of God; and offers an account of true freedom and how it can be attained. -/- This latest text in the Oxford Philosophical Texts series includes a new, lucid translation of the Ethics by G.H.R. Parkinson along with a comprehensive guide to the understanding of Spinoza's work. An extensive introduction includes: a short biography of Spinoza himself; the form of his writing including his own particular uses of definitions; an introductory guide through the philosophy of Ethics; and a summary of the contents of Ethics itself. Further aids include a glossary of terms, extensive notes to the text. (shrink)

In _Foucault Beyond Foucault_ Jeffrey Nealon argues that critics have too hastily abandoned Foucault's mid-career reflections on power, and offers a revisionist reading of the philosopher's middle and later works. Retracing power's "intensification" in Foucault, Nealon argues that forms of political power remain central to Foucault's concerns. He allows us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that have taken place since the philosopher's death in 1984. (...) In this, the book stages an overdue encounter between Foucault and post-Marxist economic history. (shrink)

This paper challenges nurses to join together as a collective in order to facilitate ongoing analysis of the issues that arise for nurses and patients when nursing care is harnessed for health care efficiencies. It is a call for nurses to respond with a collective strategy through which we can ‘talk back’ and ‘act back’ to the powerful rationality of current thinking and practices. The paper uses examples from an institutional ethnographic (IE) research project to demonstrate how dominant approaches to (...) understanding nursing position nurses to overlook how we activate practices of reform that reorganize how we nurse. The paper then describes two classroom strategies taken from my work with students in undergraduate and graduate programs. The teaching strategies I describe rely on the theoretical framework that underpin the development of an IE analysis. Taken into the classroom (or into other venues of nursing activism) the tools of IE can be adapted to inform a pedagogical approach that supports nurses to develop an alternate analysis to what is happening in our work. (shrink)

An aim of all of the management of healthcare systems is the smooth provision of services. A great deal of effort is put into ensuring processes will obtain this ideal – the well‐run system. The central argument in this paper is that these processes result in a system that perpetrates violence and coercion on its clients and workers. This violence is structural and personalizing in its effects. Moreover, time and effort is taken away from the actual work of the system (...) for its management. Under such managerialist control, the idea of chaos and the need to ensure order are used to fuel an apparatus that takes the focus from other aspects of the system such as the power relations that keep the system as it is. In such an ordering, the clinical audit is promoted as a method to ensure order by keeping ahead of, or removing the potential for chaos. In using Žižek's ideas about violence it is possible to identify how efforts and attempts to correct the system are doomed to fail just as they hide how nurses' enrolment in the service of the system leads to alienation and subjectification. A central aim of this paper is to rethink how power and implicit violence are practised in such processes. To overcome the inherent violence of the audit culture, this paper suggests an interruption of audit cultures with a promotion of more radical positions for nursing practice and clinically based research. The hope is to recalculate and interrupt how nurses are to operate in the management structures that organize healthcare. (shrink)