Narrative and Affect in the Analysis of Foreign Policy Rhetoric

The article is devoted to the narrative aspects of the foreign policy rhetoric of Russia. It singles out the stages of its development (since 1994), its content, and its plot. The current intensity of affect in politics is often explained through psychological or even neurological reasons, but, in this article, the authors tried to place it into the literary and rhetorical context. The politicians responsible for framing the Russian national policy use narrative constructions that are supposed to channel the audience's negative feelings and to reinforce them. The emotionality of politics has to do with the ambivalence of international relations conceived either as an unexpected encounter with evil forces or as a frustration of hopes and rejection of appeals by a superior power. In the former case, the narrative (both tragic and sentimental) tells of Russia's striving for its shining future which constantly fails through the intervention of bad luck. In the latter case, Russia's kind and friendly intentions and initiatives meet with neglect on the part of the West, all this in the context of the incessant clashes with the "evil". Russia's identity is defined ambivalently, as the identity of a victim and of a hero, which produces tension periodically spilling into international conflicts. In the current period, the frustrations and the attacks of evil forces are ousted into the past, and the narrative proceeds from Russia's victory that is supposed to have already happened. However, these victory claims remain ambivalent because they are accompanied by emotional appeals to the West. These appeals put into question both the rupture with it and the independence from it, they bring us back to the failed hopes and to the trauma of rupture, thus producing a hysterical model of living the narrative's plot: the model that supports permanent and passive anxiety. Ceasing the intense communication with the West through the script of a novel, heroic fairy tale, or "hysteria" is possible with the mythical format of a "triumph of the hero over the beast", in which the hero would rely on his/her forces and depart from the meaningless dialogue with the "kings". With all its fictional nature, this narrative is less emotionally charged than in the first two cases. Therefore, it could potentially reduce the strain of the foreign policy process, unless it is just a phase of a dialogical anger reminding of Homer's Achilles: the offended hero withdraws to his ship and feasts there alone.

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