ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that whereas Schmitt’s Political Theology articulates the way in which sovereignty as a paradigm has drawn upon and secularises the theological concept of God as divine sovereign, his Die Buribunken elaborates a form of economic theology. This is internalised in the Buribunks’ ever-present bureaucratic recording and writing, but also in the sense of the all-seeing sovereign who would be able to read this ever-present and comprehensive archive. If Schmitt’s writing at the time is both a working through of the issues of political theology with reference to the Catholic Church, sovereignty and the law, his fictional intervention involves an alternative response to Max Weber and his theses on the bureaucratisation and disenchantment of modernity. This chapter positions Schmitt’s Die Buribunken as a science fiction meditation on the economic theological conception of omniscience against the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, arguing that each involves a debate over the nature of the theological, the bureaucratic and the economic, which is prescient of our digital modernity.
