ABSTRACT
Surgeons and other clinicians routinely find themselves grappling daily with the surprises and shocks that characterise the uncertainty of medical practice. In coping with an unfamiliar situation, how the surgeon experiences the event and engages with the encounter (affective relations) may trigger ways of responding (i.e. thinking, acting) that she had not conceived of prior to the event. Authorised manuals of practice (Official Care) do not fully capture the complexity of actual events of practice (Real Care). Further, despite the best laid intentions, such handbooks of practice can fail to make the appropriate impressions upon clinicians and how they engage and cope with the contingency of practice. This is not to claim that professional codes of conduct are defunct or unheeded. Instead, this chapter draws attention to how the notion of ethics can exceed a moral code to emphasise an individual’s capacity to act and the affective relations that enable or diminish the power to act: an ethics of immanence (Deleuze 1994). An ethics of immanence is distinguished by the singularity of an event – the specific situation an individual finds himself in at a given moment and his efforts to find a way forward.
