In the late 20th and early 21st century, time - as a concept, an object, a theme, or a category of understanding and of experience - has been increasingly lmobilized as a critical category in the social sciences and the humanities. In different ways, we have come to be interpellated by the injunction to take time seriously in an endeavor to shed light on unacknowledged assumptions, clarify conceptual debates, improve empirical investigations, and work towards better social and political analysis, action, and disposition. In particular, debates in International Relations have responded to this interpellation by considering the limits and possibilities coming from its often-unacknowledged conceptions of time. In this dissertation, I surmise that, even though there is no contending with these assertions and the important work stemming from them, there are also good reasons for us to consider them under a different light. In this sense, I engage this literature not so much in terms of the legitimacy of positions articulated in it, but in terms of their conditions of existence and their particular effects. More specifically, I propose we read this topicality of time as a discursive formation, that is, a set of regularities that organize and distribute time in fields of knowledge, affects, and power through which we come to govern ourselves and others. To do so, I start from a reading of discourse that brings together Foucault s early emphasis on fields of dispersion with an interpretation of discursive formations as circuits of affects through which they not only become libidinally invested, but also effectively libidinal. I then develop two arguments. First, by working through debates over time and world politics, I make emerge the fields of concepts, objects, subjects, and strategies under which they take place. In doing so, I argue they tend to reproduce dualisms such as fixity/fluidity, timeliness/disjunction, unity/multiplicity, necessity/contingency, and metaphors of scales and turns that often recuperate the very conceptions of modern politics and subjectivity they proclaim to run counter by taking time seriously. Instead of reading such ambivalence as a problem, however, I venture we should understand it in terms of the productive effects of the discourse of time. Second, moving towards an understanding of melancholia as an articulation of discursive relations through loss, identification, reflexivity, and enjoyment, I propose we can name the discourse of time melancholic. In doing so, I argue that the above discourse is not only embedded with powerful luring effects, but also that it gives particular form to present melancholia. Given these melancholic fields of knowledge-power that are the discourse of time, I conclude by proposing that the topicality of time since the late 20th century can tell us something about the modes of government being mobilized in world politics at least, if not also beyond.