Lexington Books
Pages: 228
•
Trim: 6 x 9½
978-1-4985-6436-6 • Hardback • December 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-6437-3 • eBook • December 2018 • $99.50 • (£77.00)
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is associate professor of philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology.
Introduction: Islamic Futurism? A Study in Political Aesthetics
Chapter 1: ISIS and Futurism: An Impossible Comparison?
Chapter 2: The Futurist Aesthetics of ISIS
Chapter 3: From Cyberpunk back to Futurism: The Trajectory of ISIS
Chapter 4: Fascism, ISIS, and Futurism
Chapter 5: Islam
Chapter 6: Terrorism and Cyberpunk
Chapter 7: The Real Machine vs. the Virtual Machine
Conclusion: Artificial Optimism Then and Today
Epilogue
Joyfully tearing down the compartment walls that conventionally separate fascist studies from research into jihadism, and gleefully crossing the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, Botz-Bornstein challenges, or rather provokes, the reader to reconfigure the space that fascist and terrorist destructiveness occupy in the contemporary media, party-political and historical imaginations. Not afraid to alienate experts in both fields of study, his book creates new connections and suggests fresh juxtapositions with futurist abandon. Though the ludic may prevail over the academic, The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism exposes the veins of a perversely politicized brand of modernism that throb just under the surface of two ideologies that claim to be rooted in an imperial or religious tradition, and which expresses itself in deliberately staged acts of spectacularly aestheticized destruction.
— Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism