Benjamin A. Saltzman, The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture: Turning Away. Thinking Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2026, 297 pp., 73 figs., 17 plates.

When people look, gaze, stare, listen, touch, or speak, they initiate a highly complex epistemological process, which needs to be analyzed from a psychological, historical, cultural-anthropological, religious, ethical, and moral perspective. But Saltzman, in a truly magisterial new study, does not examine the gaze as such; instead, his major concern focuses on the moment when people look away unable to stand the horror, pain, or suffering in front of their eyes; so, it is the very opposite of gazing which implies an intentional inspection of what is happening in front of one’s eyes. There can also be shame and embarrassment involved, and turning away one’s eyes or blocking them constitutes a desperate, helpless move, a silent outcry of our humanity. But, by contrast, there are also numerous other moments when something absolutely terrible happens, such as the murdering of innocent people, and the perpetrator simply looks on in cold blood gazing at the writhing, screaming, or mangled body. What has happened to those people? Do they still belong to humanity? Most infamously, we know of this phenomenon from the Nazi concentration camp guards, and ever since from other guards of similar death camps. But turning away can also be an expression of confusion, a sense of being overwhelmed, awed, or humiliated. Saltzman makes a huge effort to come to terms with all those aspects, marshaling modern psychoanalysis, art history, literary history, photography, sociology, and related fields of investigation, taking us from ancient times to the present, creating connections across the centuries and many different human expressions. To do justice to this massive volume proves to be a huge challenge, but I can certainly affirm that the author offers an amazing amount of critical discussions of many different but all interlocking aspects.