Campus eBookstore Logo

Skip Navigation LinksEBook Details

The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism

The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism
Author: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Price: $111.00
ISBN-10: 1498564372
ISBN-13: 9781498564373
Get It!:
Delivery: BibliU Reader
Duration: Lifetime

Note:
Copy Selections To Clipboard: Copying content to the clipboard is completely disabled
Printing Pages: Printing pages is completely disabled

Description

Through empirical analysis and theoretical reflection, this book shows that the aesthetics and politics of the Islamic State is “futurist.” ISIS overcomes postmodern pessimism and joins the modern, techno-oriented, and optimistic attitude propagated by Italian Futurism in the early twentieth century. The Islamic State does not only excel through the extensive use of high-tech weapons, social media, commercial bot, and automated text systems. By putting forward the presence of speeding cars and tanks, mobile phones, and computers, ISIS presents jihad life as connected to modern urban culture. Futurism praised violence as a means of leaving behind imitations of the past in order to project itself most efficiently into the future. A profound sense of crisis produces in both Futurism and jihadism a nihilistic attitude toward the present state of society that will be overcome through an exaltation of technology. Futurists were opposed to parliamentary democracy and sympathized with nationalism and colonialism. ISIS jihadism suggests a similarly curious combination of modernism and conservative values. The most obvious modern characteristic of this new image of fundamentalism is the highly aestheticized recruiting material.