A mesmerizing aspect of Samuel Beckett's work, and what transports readers into near obsessional delight, is its uncanny ability to capture chaos on the page. He represents the unrepresentable, succeeds in failed experiments, and creates unforgettable voices characterized by distinctive silences. It is no wonder that writing about him is difficult, and it is perhaps why critics are becoming more and more accustomed to Beckett scholarship that is so philosophically oriented that its ostensible subject is often eclipsed by collateral philosophical sources. Such philosophical criticism, while intended to provide contexts for structuring Beckettian chaos, often has little new to say about, or in the worst cases completely marginalizes, Beckett himself, leaving textual purists unsatisfied. Anthony Uhlmann's Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image flirts with the would-be philosophical genre of Beckettian criticism but offers something so textually substantive that it should satisfy both critical camps.

Uhlmann's book is best described as a scholarly investigation of the genealogy of the image as it has developed within an aesthetic tradition, in which Beckett plays a critical role. It begins with a look at Henri Bergson's theory of perception, which argues that when aspects of images do not interest viewers, those aspects are discarded through a process of “subtraction.” This leads into a consideration of Gilles Deleuze's distinction between presentation and representation, in which “the presentation is the image in its fullness [while] representation is an interpretation of the presentation” (14).

By means of Bergson and Deleuze, Uhlmann reaches two principal contentions. The first of these, “that Beckett's works interact in important ways with works of philosophy” (65), does not seem particularly contentious. That Beckett's images are not predigested representation but are more akin to Deleuzean presentation—the pinnacle of creative immediacy and authenticity—does not require much argumentation. More substantive is his claim that Beckett's use of the philosophical image leads to an aesthetic of nonrelation.

Uhlmann's understanding of Beckett's evolving aesthetic is indebted to the work of J. E. Dearlove, whose Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Nonrelational Art (Durham, NC, 1982) is one source of several of Uhlmann's critical suppositions. Uhlmann builds on Dearlove's thesis that Beckett's work becomes increasingly aware of itself as a narrative of “nonrelation,” defined by Dearlove as the idea that “perhaps no relationships exist between or among the artist, his art, and an external reality” (vii). Uhlmann embraces Dearlove's evolutionary topology as well as his chronology, which marks Beckett's first novel Murphy as the moment of transition from an “Apollonian narrator,” who accepts relational art as a possibility, and the “Murphian narrator,” who embraces nonrelation.

Focusing not on voice, but instead on the evolving use of image in Beckett's texts, Uhlmann proposes that, pre-Murphy, Beckett's images function as conventional allusions, in which readerly satisfaction is gained from the correct identification and contextualization of an allusion's source. However, Beckett's images gradually gain sophistication and become part of a more complex and self-aware aesthetic of nonrelation that shifts in Murphy. Post-Murphy, Beckettian images are divested of metaphorical resonance. Through deliberate acts of occlusion, images point to unbridgeable gaps between the text and the world outside the text. Allusion still allows for recognition, but this recognition resists singular or “correct” associative meanings.

Uhlmann does not explore the formal strategies of this occlusion. Instead, he interrogates the credibility of critical conventions regarding the sources of the images. For example, he challenges the privileged strain of Cartesian criticisms by arguing that Arnold Geulincx and not Descartes is the origin of the Beckettian cogito. Persuasively addressing why previous analyses of Geulincx in Beckett have been vague and unsatisfying—first because an English translation of Geulincx is only now forthcoming (Uhlmann himself will edit the edition), and second because new manuscript material, including Beckett's notes on Geulincx's Metaphysica Vera, Questiones Quodlibeticae and Ethica, have only recently been made available to scholars by Trinity College Dublin's library—chapter 4's meticulously documented look at Geulingian theory as an influence on Watt, Molloy, The Unnamable, and Film provides one of this study's highlights.

As such central contentions concern influence rather than literary forms, at times Beckett's work is represented as a point of exchange for ideas, rather than as a source of them. While Uhlmann's close readings offer evidence enough of an original Beckettian aesthetic, his focus emphasizes Beckett's role in a h illustration, but subordinate to the central argument, as what concerns Uhlmann is the relevance of Bergson's ideas to Beckett. And while he acknowledges that there are moments when Beckett diverges from, or “goes beyond” (126), Bergson, the chapter ultimately asks readers to appreciate Beckett's enactment of a Bergonsonian nonrelation.

The final chapter abruptly changes trajectory to consider violence in Beckett's later works. Linking this chapter to the concept of “image” by means of the enigmatic phrase “the image of a being of violence” (129), which emerges from a brief incursion into Stoic thinking, Uhlmann begins a discussion of violence in What Where, Come and Go, The Lost Ones, and Quad, which might belong in a separate book where the premises would have time to be more thoroughly explored.

This addition to Uhlmann's growing body of critical work might have been more aptly titled A History of the Image: Bergson, Deleuze, Geulincx, and Beckett. However, once readers know what to expect they are likely to appreciate this in-depth examination of the evolution of the philosophical image as art. It is a sure-footed analysis of an aesthetic history, explored across Beckettian texts with interesting digressions into the works of other notables including Joyce, Proust, and Lewis Carroll—with the appeasing caveat that “Beckett has developed the idea of the image more fully than any other writer” (147).