Gestures of Aversion

FAIN: FEL-281536-22

Benjamin A. Saltzman
University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)

Research and writing leading to a book on representations of aversion in European literature and art from antiquity to the early modern period.

I am proposing a book about the visual representations of violence and the ways certain figures in various corners of premodern art and literature cover their faces or turn away from scenes of suffering. Some of these figures are prominent; others are more inconspicuous. But their gestures are always richly laden with meaning. In studying these gestures from antiquity to the early modern period while focused centrally on the Middle Ages, Gestures of Aversion attends to the nuanced and syntactical rhythms that emerge in the movement between looking and not looking, attraction and aversion, affect and performance, the involuntary and the voluntary. Crucially, it also considers the ways that art—both literary and visual—hermeneutically mediates these rhythms for its own viewers and audiences through the gesturing figure and the gesture’s ambiguity.

Associated Products

Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Book)
Title: Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture
Author: Benjamin A. Saltzman
Abstract: A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential episodes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these episodes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.
Year: 2026
Primary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo264591260.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226847221
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---