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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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the narrative of the nation, while obliterating the operation of
immanent power that governs the life-world of history.
Rosca’s writing of history seeks to uncover what is often
concealed by the operation of transcendent power. Her novel
stresses linkages between public and private, dominant power and
disciplinary governance, by using the rhetoric of love and episodes
of intimacy and private feelings in her portrayal of public violence.
In
State of War
, the intimate frontiers of empire are intermingled
with, and often saturated by, the violence of religious, military, or
political coercion. Since public violence is part of the fundamental
making of the private sphere, the effects of violence on individual
characters are both coercive and productive. In the historical
condition of imperial intimacy, transcendental power is folded into
the immanent plane of the everyday life, creating such emotions as
shame, fear, and betrayal in the subjects’ “intimate” encounters
with the colonizers and the totalitarian regime. These emotions
provide windows through which readers can view the characters’
feelings about themselves, the colonizers, and their reactions to the
historical moments in which they live. For affective subjects in
colonial times, shame arises when they are coerced into loving
their colonizers. During the time of Marcos’s totalitarian reign,
fear was a predominant feeling, derived from the sense of
insecurity on the part of the government for not being able to fully
control the people, and on the part of the people for the danger
that permeated everyday life, and for their ignorance of who to
trust, and what to expect in the future. Fear and suspicion
inevitably lead to acts of betrayal that further undermine the
security of the society.
In the meantime, these emotions are not self-contained
individual feelings, but affects that derive from bodily responses to
the environment and circulate among bodies. The affective
subjects’ capability of affecting and being affected by others in the
environment thus not only produces subjects who
feel
, but subjects
who are molded into beings as they encounter other bodies. Recent