Jihad
| Okwui Enwezor Gwangju, September 6th, 12:00 - 12:45 Download |
My presentation this afternoon will continue on some of the themes that I explored in my conversation with Jo Ractliffe a few moments ago and I am speaking about Jihad but also would like to use the opportunity to link this question of Jihad to what I call incasarated life, to look at the relationship of contemporary arts and the security state. I think it's been in a very much part of the lexicon of the emergency in which we're operating today to speak of Jihad from the point of view of a nihilistic practice, of senseless violence, violence that has no ethical core. But as we know, the notion of Jihad in Islam obviously has very little to do with any of those things, has very little to do with the idea of violence but rather that Jihad locates at its core the question of spiritual struggle, a struggle for self-realization. And the question today in terms of speaking about Jihad which in many ways really goes to the issue of subject formation is, how do these struggles concerning this spiritual inner condition of the individual manifested within the general global condition under which the current states of war is been prosecuted.