Research Project Thorsten Botz-Bornstein https://www.botzbornstein.org/italian-futurism The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs.” These are the first sentences of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Soon the idyll is disturbed by the “famished roar of automobiles” and the group decides to leave the mosque chasing “after Death” like “young lions” (Marinetti 1909: 49-50). The juxtaposition of an orientalist idyll, a modern techno-world, and death is intriguing and reminiscent of the aesthetic universe most recently produced by the propaganda of the Islamic State (ISIS). Summary: The "Futurist" Aesthetics of ISIS I show by means of empirical analyses and theoretical reflections that the aesthetics of the Islamic State is “futurist.” Italian Futurism praised violence as a means of leaving behind imitations of the past in order to project itself most efficiently into the future. Futurism glorified cars and modern cities, and emphasized speed, technology, and youth. ISIS overcomes the postmodern, pessimistic futurism of “cyberpunk” and links itself to the optimistic attitude that was common in Italian Futurism in the early twentieth century. ISIS returns to modernism. Cyberpunk stands for the exhaustion of the industrial economy while Italian Futurism is the origin of an optimistic kind of Science Fiction. In ISIS wars, real, breathing bodies are steering real, steaming machines. In a “futurist” way, ISIS rediscovers the “real machine” as opposed to the postmodern, virtual “nano” machine. ISIS also brings back a corpo-reality into a world that has become more and more mediated by technology. Leaving the “postmodern” behind, ISIS goes back to the future imagined by Futurism. Futurism glorified cars and modern cities, and emphasized speed, technology, youth,