The project is structured around the following major hypotheses:
1. Relying on the Deleuzian adaptation of classical Greek thought, it can be surmised that the Russian foreign policy discourse tends to prioritize aion, the virtual time where the past and the future eternally coexist, over chronos, the flow of time where the present is the moving focal point. The repression of the chronos by the aion is the major trait of the temporal construction of the Russian foreign policy discourse.
2. The Russian foreign policy discourse draws a distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic past. The authentic past opens the authentic present and creates the moment of opportunity increasingly understood in military terms.
3. The war in Ukraine has been narrated in Russia, in temporal terms, as an opportunity to disrupt the entire Western chronos. The war has become a “chronocide”, an attempt to inflict a mortal blow on the “inauthentic” temporal order.
The project aims at deconstructing the temporal dimensions of the Russian foreign policy discourse. It would allow tracing the correlations between the discourse and the pool of social, political and philosophic meanings of time and rooting for the foundations of the discourse’s resilience and fragility.