This course will trace the history and political significance of iconoclasm, ranging from the medieval iconoclastic debates to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the wave of cultural destruction in Syria and Iraq today, examining how the breaking of images is an integral part of religious and political revolutions.

We will explore the tension and contradiction that exist within the iconoclastic act and its rhetoric, which bestows power and vivacity upon the very objects whose power and efficacy it seeks to deny and denounce. The power of images is perhaps most dramatically and insistently evident in their destruction. Far from signaling their insignificance, iconoclasm is a measure of the intensity of feeling and conviction associated with certain kinds of images.

We shall see how, throughout history, iconoclasm itself has recognized and utilized the power of images. It does not simply do away with icons and artifacts, it replaces them with its own images of destruction, absence, as well as actively producing ‘pure’ and approved artifacts. This can be seen in the broken images still on display throughout Europe, the whitewashed walls of Churches, the raised and toppled statues of dictators from Lenin to Saddam Hussein, or the images of iconoclastic zeal that the Taliban and ISIS produce and disseminate.

The course will also reflect on forms of iconoclasm that do not involve the physical destruction of artifacts, but rather an effort to redraw the relationship between the signifier and the signified. This occurred, for example, with the Enlightenment’s iconoclastic act of stripping artifacts of their religious meaning, divorcing them from the web of practices and rituals that defined them by ‘elevating’ them to works of art, and placing them on pedestals in museums.