Tortured body, betrayed heart: state violence in an Indonesian novel by an ex-political prisoner of the ‘1965 affair’

Within the Baconian perspective, torture is a discourse of ‘discovery’. Like violence and coercion, which are essential for the domination of nature, torture is an appropriate technique in other realms of human inquiry (Dubois 1994; Hanson 1998). If so, it must necessarily not be practised when the ‘truth’ is already in hand. In practice, the aims of torture as an intentional act of inflicting severe pain and suffering on a person for certain purposes (United Nations 1985: 3-4), quite often go beyond the ‘truth’ inquiry. In a regime of control by fear, for instance, the effects of torture upon the (potential) victims are more anticipated than the ‘truth’ the victims tell.