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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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husband, Monola Montreal, is a physics professor and a political
dissident who attempts to counteract the corruption of the
government by collecting and exposing information about the
corporations centralized in the hands of the Commander and his
wife’s family.
12
Colonel Amor, nicknamed the Loved One,
captures Anna to extract information about her husband’s
whereabouts after her husband flees to join a guerrilla force in a
mountainous area. Amor’s name is not merely “an ironic inversion
of his identity,” or an indication of his love of power, as Myra
Mendible points out, but a true denotation of his love for
manipulating information and language through torturing the
bodies of the victims (2002: 33). The Loved One’s “enjoyment of
intimacy” with the tortured victims is not of a sadistic nature of
acquiring orgasm from another’s pain, nor is it a pleasure taken in
discovering the truth of information he desperately needs in order
to control the country. Rather, it is a fascination and obsession
with the scientific operation of the Pain Machine that features
Colonel Amor’s “love story.”
The Romance Room in which victims are tortured operates
under the tenets that pain will produce fear, and fear will induce
words, information, and truth. For Colonel Amor, power is
tangible and affective, and the body is the site on which power can
make itself felt and break open the body. Truth, therefore, is the
affective product of power: No pain, no gain. Another working
assumption of the machine is predicated upon the belief that all
people are withholding some knowledge from the authorities for
they are all rebels in disguise, and will always lie. A reversed logic
falls into place when one overemphasizes the affective capability of
totalizing power. For the Loved One believes any articulation
without the touch of power and its attendant pain is lie. Yet, two
12
As it turns out at the end of the novel, Molona is captured later by Colonel
Amor and is broken under torture, revealing information about the guerrilla
forces. He is coerced to help Amor conduct scientific tests to support his
military terrorism.