Political Theology, 1001 Cars Long: Emblems of Corporate Sovereignty in Netflix's Snowpiercer

This chapter reads the first season of Netflix's Snowpiercer as an exercise in political theology. Specifically, it argues that the season demonstrates the hermeneutic quality of political power: that the sovereign appears – and only ever appears – through its signs and symbols. The absent space of power remains absent, just as Mr Wilford remains absent from the train he created. Through exemplary analysis of key features of the first season's depiction of the train Snowpiercer (its use of corporate emblems, corporal and mirroring structures and punitive rituals) it is argued that Snowpiercer signals the repetition of tired political tropes and forms beyond their apparent collapse in the face of the climate apocalypse. This undermines science fiction's seeming potential to reimagine legal form and suggests instead a need for the self-conscious management of, or ‘working with’, inherited traditions of power.