13 Biopolitical Abjection and Sexuation: Stanley Kubrick’s Political Films Seung-hoon Jeong Paths of Glory: A Path from Existentialism to Biopolitics Paths of Glory (1958) may be Stanley Kubrick’s most ironically entitled flm. It depicts the trench warfare situation of the First World War in which a French division is ordered to take an impregnable German position at the predicted cost of many lives. Afer the inevitable failure of this “mission impossible,” three soldiers are court- martialed for having retreated out of “cowardice.” War only pushes them into paths of irrational orders, meaningless struggles, and unavoidable death. “Te absurd,” in Albert Camus’s existentialist terms, indicates this gaping void where no coherent order, clear reason, or valuable meaning of life is found. For Camus (1991: 3), “one truly serious philosophical question” is thus nothing but “suicide,” that is, to judge whether or not life is worth living. In a sense, it is as if the command of the suicidal attack and the execution of randomly picked survivors gave this judgment on behalf of those who still cling to life without facing its absurdity. Existentialism was indeed the postwar zeitgeist, and its infuence on early Kubrick is palpable in his war flms including his debut feature Fear and Desire (1953). 1 His Heideggerian view of existence as “being-toward-death” culminates in Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) in which the ultimate failure of stopping the atomic bombing even suggests the collective suicide of humankind. One might then answer the question posed in the flm’s subtitle as follows: “By expecting that the bomb will terminate an absurd humanity.” Tis absurd may include our proximity to a state of nature, the corruptness of authority and human institutions, disillusionment with ideals such as progress, the banality of the good, the pull of immediate pleasures, the divergence of appearances from reality, the seepage of the nightmare world into daily existence, and the grasping for salvation from beyond the human condition through technology or alien life. (Murray and Schuler 2009, 136) Of course, the flm’s ironic subtitle is a nod to a seemingly inescapable doomsday, to which Kubrick alerts with the backdrop of the Cold War crisis and 1960s nuclear angst. After Kubrick.indb 243 20-11-2019 17:21:46