From Relation to Non-Relation: an aesthetics of the image

In his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), which remained unpublished during his lifetime, Samuel Beckett describes an aesthetic theory which emphasises the connections or relations between things rather than the nature of those things themselves. In a later letter to Georges Duthuit (written in 1949 and soon to be published for the first time) Beckett outlines a somewhat different aesthetic understanding, one which emphasises  non-relation or the refusal to fully draw connections or relationships. The aesthetic of non-relation (outlined most famously in ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, 1949) has long puzzled both Beckett critics and those artists and theorists who have been touched by Beckett’s methods or works, yet in Beckett’s later works one can see it practised, in particular, in Beckett’s use of the image as a ‘presentation’ rather than a ‘representation’.

In Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt describes how Deleuze develops themes which have a long history in the Western philosophical tradition, but which have only momentarily dominated that tradition. These ideas have, for the most part, been marginalised. One might apply Hardt’s idea to an understanding of the image that has emerged at various times within the western philosophical tradition, and that has been both suggested by and answered by certain kinds of artistic practice within the western aesthetic tradition. At times this idea has emerged with clarity and force, and at times the insights it claims to reveal have been surrounded, taunted, ridiculed. This idea considers that the apprehension of the image (which, as a presentation,  emerges from the real and is impressed upon our senses like a ‘signet ring in wax’) is fundamental both to our understanding of what the world is and how we know that world.

In this paper I argue that Beckett’s aesthetic theories (which concern the visual arts as much as literature as Beckett’s discussions with Duthuit specifically focus on the visual arts) can be applied beyond his own works as a general theory of aesthetic practice; one which considers the importance  of the nature of the image within an aesthetic of non-relation.

Anthony Uhlmann, School of Humanities, University of Western Sydney