ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) motivations, with ontological violence as the goal toward which their efforts are motivated. The regime’s public boasting of its destructive acts and its rationalization of these acts in official documents and periodicals provides an unusually dense empirical base. ISIS’s innovation was to offer a new script, which not only negated the symbolic and historic value of antiquities but also justified their total destruction. Concentrating on the dimension of ontology allows us to build a more robust understanding of cultural violence in which the objects, sites, and practices of destruction have social effects independent of bloodletting. The Islamic State provides a particular case of cultural violence, which aimed at totalizing and irreversible loss. It was totalizing because it sought not just to invalidate the meaning of specific figures or practices but to strip them of their cultural logic.
