A theological jurisprudence of speculative cinema superheroes, science fictions and fantasies of modern law

Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and ‘life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.

Chapter 5 is the first of two chapters that considers law and science fiction. This chapter focuses on Alex Proyas’s cinematic rendering of the work of Isaac Asimov in the film I, Robot. Situated within the tradition of hard sci-fi that explicitly imagines a technologized, scientific and dis-enchanted world, the film presents a vision of law as rule without exception encapsulated in the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’. Whilst such a vision of law would appear to exclude political theology, with its miraculous exception, we find in Proyas’s rendering theological allusions that highlight essential limitations: both of its technologized world-view and the vision of legality that undergirds it. In examining these theological allusions, this chapter draws upon the ‘return to Paul’ in critical theory, particularly the work of Alain Badiou and his philosophy of ‘the event’. St Paul’s message calls us ‘beyond the law’, overcoming its limits and inviting us to step outside the differences its ‘letter’ institutes. The Chapter concludes by examining how ‘the event’, as rendered by a robot not subject to the three laws, rejects an abstract universalism—associated with modern law—in favour of a universal singularity that, instituted by love, founds a freedom beyond the law.

This book sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law. Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films—Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas’s and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit—Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. The book offers a key contribution to the fields of cultural legal studies, law and film and law and theology by considering speculative fiction (superheroes, science fiction, fantasy) as a way of revealing the theologies of modern law and legal theory. The overall narrative of the work marks a course from antagonism to reconciliation, from autonomy to reciprocity and from law to love. Throughout the work, the book draws on resources within the Christian theological tradition’s critical engagement with law, as a means for rethinking and reimagining our post-secular legal modernity—enabling both a deactivating and fulfilling of the law. In exploring speculative film’s estranged accounts of the mythos of modernity and modern law, it articulates an alternative theological jurisprudence based on a love that takes us beyond the law.

A Theological Jurisprudence of Speculative Cinema: Superheroes, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law

The law is developed by human beings, for human beings, in legal terms, for “natural persons”. But during the development of the law in the long journey from the Roman legal system until our modern law system many things have changed. Natural persons are not the only players in the legal system of today. Large and smaller enterprises, organizations and state entities are performing all kinds of legal acts, as legal persons they can be held liable for the things they do. What about intelligence machines that can perform autonomous or semi-autonomous tasks? What about an advanced operating system where human control is hardly noticeable? What about drones operating independently? Are they liable for their acts and, most important, their mistakes? What about the laser cut that went wrong because of a disturbance in the internet that the surgeon did not control? Is the man behind the screen always the responsible party, even if he is not behind the screen? This article will discuss these ongoing questions.

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.