The Islamic state and the necromancy of the mundane -

Abstract

In an effort to understand the ‘unintelligible’, researchers have attempted to examine the Islamic State through various lenses. Indeed, studies have analyzed the phenomenon using geopolitical, security, Orientalist and counter-Orientalist frameworks. However, these approaches have overlooked a close analysis of the Islamic State’s discursive production of its worldview and rendered the phenomenon of the Islamic State to be under-theorized in the scholarly trend. Thereof, a formal analysis of the Islamic State that begins from its publications is valuable for understanding the ideology that animates the militant group. This is essential for understanding the emergence of the Islamic State as symptomatic of our present historical moment that is characterized by a crisis of capitalism, and a concomitant rise of right-wing populism (fascism) and neo-liberalism. This thesis shows how the Islamic State works to attract recruits from all over the world by promoting fantasies of belongingness and a sense of urgency of belonging to its folds, which is premised on eschatological crisis. The tropes of the Islamic State’s ideological fantasies are woven around the notion of a ‘grayzone’ and the conception of hypocrisy as an evil and equality in death as a virtue. The thesis argues that the focus on the Islamic State’s brutal violence, as a subjective outbreak that is aberrant and singular, overlooks the objective, systemic, and structural violence of capitalist globalization within which the Islamic State functions. Hence the thesis will provide an analysis of the spectacularization of violence that the militant group performs in the context of the capitalist “society of spectacle”.