「陰性崇高」：黎．米勒的戰爭攝影

Abstract

黎．米勒（Lee Miller, 1907-1977）是拍攝第二次世界大戰的著名攝影家，本文主要聚焦於她在1940年捕捉英倫大轟炸的廢墟照片，以及她在1944至1945年間以《時尚》（Vogue）雜誌歐洲戰地通訊記者的身分，拍攝傷兵與大屠殺屍體的照片。在過去十五年，學者們對米勒戰地攝影的詮釋呈現兩極化的矛盾觀點，一些學者認為它們以疏離效果來強調觀者與拍攝對象之間的差異，另外一些學者宣稱它們召喚了觀者對拍攝對象的認同感，筆者則試圖化解這些學者的矛盾解讀。筆者嘗試從視覺分析出發，將佛利曼（Barbara Claire Freeman）等人探討「陰性崇高」（the feminine sublime）的女性主義文學理論與研究，以及艾婷爵（Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger）所提議「母體式的」（matrixial）觀視理論，轉化成詮釋米勒戰爭攝影的理論架構，以創新的角度探討米勒所開拓知覺戰爭創傷的獨特方式，也就是展現「陰性崇高」的美學與倫理學。筆者將分析，米勒創傷攝影中的「陰性崇高」情境，與英國思想家柏克（Edmund Burke）在《關於崇高與優美觀念的起源之哲學探討》（A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757）中所建立的「崇高」的美感經驗不同，觀者並無法如柏克所論，超脫並主宰作為威脅來源的戰爭創傷，而是在自我與他者介於融入與超脫的動態關係中，體驗與尊重他者創傷無法化約的「他異性」。米勒所建立這種知覺創傷影像的模式，不僅是一種女性主義的觀看實踐，而且還可以召喚所有的反戰觀者，以「陰性崇高」的觀視來體悟父權與戰爭所造成的毀滅性創傷。

Lee Miller (1907-1977) is famous for the pictures she took during World War Two. This paper concentrates on her photographs of the London Blitz in 1940 and her photographs of the damaged bodies of the soldiers and of the dead bodies of the holocaust from 1944 to 1945. In the past fifteen years, scholars have been dealing with Miller's war photography with polemic perspectives. Some scholars think that Miller attempts to highlight the difference between the spectator and the image through alienation effects. Others assert that Miller tends to evoke empathic concern of the spectator to the scene. This paper is going to reconcile these apparently contradictory points of view. My discourse, based on visual analyses, will appropriate theories of the feminine sublime established by Barbara Claire Freeman and other feminist scholars, as well as the theory of the matrixial gaze proposed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, in order to explore Miller's special way of perceiving the war traumas. My argument is that the aesthetics and ethics of the feminine sublime in Miller's photographs are different from Edmund Burke's conceptualization of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke cliams that the spectator, while approaching the sublime, remains a protecting distance from the awful source in order to control it. However, when the spectator experiences Miller's works, s/he is not able to celebrate the self's capacity to master the threatening war traumas through a state of detachment. The spectator, within the experience of the sublime, neither possesses nor merges with the other, but attests to a relation in-between the detachment to and the identification with the other. S/he opens herself to and show respect for the alterity of the other without an intention to domesticate it. Miller's cultivation of the aesthetics and ethics of the feminine sublime is not only a feminist practice of looking, but could also evoke all anti-war spectators to perceive the destructive traumas caused by the collusion of the patriarchy with war through beholding the feminine sublime.