Angels of the apocalypse

Carl Schmitt argued that “all significant concepts of the modern state are secularised theological concepts”. Yet while this insight has been broadly applied to contemporary political theory, fiction is less commonly considered in its relationship to the field of political theology which emerged in Schmitt’s wake. Both medieval Christendom and secular modernity have produced theories and theologies not only of the way that things are, but also of the way that things might be, and have speculated about  possible ends of the world. This project will explore the relationship between theological and fictional speculations about the end of the world, via a consideration of apocalyptic angel films from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The first part of the project will explore the role of theological imagery in the speculative apocalyptic imaginary of apocalyptic angel films. The second part of the project will use this early work to develop a theoretical account of the relationship between theological and fictional imaginaries of the end of the world.