The Katechon and the Messias

Time, History, and Threat in Brazil’s Aspirational Fascism

Bibliographic Data

ID2230647
AuthorsB Reinhardt (0000-0003-3853-5927, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume66
Issue3
Pages332-361
Publication date2025-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/735570
OpenAlexW4409983497
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited53

Since 2013 Brazil has been experiencing a crisis in the political, a rupture and rapture in the very foundations that sustain society, history, and politics as meaningful, operational concepts. The rise to power of Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s local breed of aspirational fascism both responded to and intensified such a temporal vortex tactically, albeit chaotically. In this article, I reflect on bolsonarismo’s chronopolitics, especially the role played by threat and undecidability in its project of eroding the liberal democratic order from within. As a “reactionary revolution” or an “accelerationist conservatism,” bolsonarismo is ungraspable through the linear, homogeneous, empty time of secular historicism. It is better accessed through theopolitical figures such as the katechon, a purely negative restrainer of chaos that both signals to and stands in the way of a messianic denouement. I explore how this paranoid and undecided mode of government draws on and renews Brazil’s authoritarian “mimetic archive,” how it produces new political rituals and styles of publicity among its constituencies, and how it mobilizes threat as an atmospheric medium. Such temporal dynamics were never as clear as in the 2021 Independence Day protests, when bolsonarismo made time by threatening to make history before retreating.

French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism