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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
7
time and place that differ from those of liberal-capitalist societies,
Berlant’s suggestion that once crisis becomes part of the everyday
lived experience, people will adapt themselves and improvise
different strategies of living in the moment is quite relevant to the
present study. With its extensive delineation of Spanish
colonization, American imperial conquest, Japanese invasion, and
Marcos’ totalitarian reign serving as the historical backdrops to the
everyday lives of the characters to which they respond affectively,
State of War
can be seen as a historical novel marked by an
affective epistemology. Rosca’s understanding of the “state of war”
includes both the violence of warfare and a condition of crisis in
the ordinary induced by the intrusion of the public into the private
lives of the characters. In the novel, the present of history is
saturated with crises produced in the intersection of the public and
the private. The public events/history of the nation
—
war,
colonialism, changes of rules, institutional violence
—
invade and
reshape the characters in their everyday lives and positions them
not as national subjects but affective subjects. Here, I take national
subjects as the subjects produced by the historical narrative, which
sets as its
telos
the discovery of a timeless truth of its national past.
The task of the national history is to recuperate the achievements
of the past, while the mission of the national subject is to secure
the continual development and prosperity of the nation based upon
a common identity and a shared sense of obligation to the nation.
By contrast, affective subjects are those who are intimately engaged
with the present of history, responding to its crisis affectively,
while in the meantime allowing that affective response to penetrate
and forge their subjectivity.
Rosca’s writing of the affective history of the everyday
disrupts the opposition between the public and the private by
highlighting the characters’ affective responses to, and corporeal
adaptation to, public events and historical changes, be they
violence, war, or changing political rules, to the extent that
the
present
of these public events becomes available to them in the