On 15 October (time TBA), the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University hosts Dr Tommy Lynch, Reader in Political Theology at the University of Chichester, for a lecture titled "Cruel Hope at the End of the World: The Dilemmas of Polycrisis Cinema.” The lecture is sponsored by Oscar och Signe Krooks stiftelse, and in collaboration with the research program "At the End of the World"

In the lecture, Dr. Thomas Lynch asks how recent films offer gestures of hope, sometimes by design and sometimes despite themselves, even while picturing bleak futures. The difficulty identified is that a concrete hope for the future has come to seem implausible, while a more open-ended hopefulness stays directionless. To draw this out he reads recent work such as 2073 and The End We Start From against the much starker apocalyptic films of the Cold War. 

The lecture grows out of a forthcoming book, tentatively titled Watching the End(s) of the World, which aims to be the most comprehensive analysis of apocalyptic cinema to date, covering English-language film from 1933 to the present. Tracing nature, family, gender, disability and race across that history, Lynch argues that philosophical, theoretical and theological writing on cinema has too often used films to illustrate ideas already in hand, instead of attending to the strange, inconsistent and sometimes transgressive ways people have imagined the world's end.

 

Dr. Tommy Lynch is Reader in Political Theology at the University of Chichester and the author of Apocalyptic Political Theology: Hegel, Taubes and Malabou (Bloomsbury, 2019), with research interests spanning political theology, continental philosophy, and the intersection of race and religion. Lynch serves as associate editor of the journal Political Theology and sits on the International Advisory Board of At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and Present.