The Katechon and the Messias Time, History, and Threat in Brazil’s Aspirational Fascism Bruno Reinhardt 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. In Brazil today, the past is as uncertain as the future. 1 We have become a nearly asynchronous society, crisscrossed by incommensurable temporal horizons and historical truth regimes (Bloch 1977). In a shattered everyday, not much can be assumed as tacit knowledge, which increases the emotional costs of sociality and renders the labor of recognition literally exhaustive, encouraging isolation. I cannot know whether my neighbors are living a revolution, a coup, or political life as usual. I cannot know whether the flag in front of their homes is a symbol of national unity or factionalism, an invitation or a threat. This is to say that, in Brazil today (I avoid calling it “contemporary”), there is no longer room for bourgeois his- toricism, which Walter Benjamin (1969:261) famously de- fined as “progression through a homogeneous, empty time” and Benedict Anderson (1983) associated with the typically modern sense of simultaneity assembling national imagined communities. Historicist promises of a perpetual epistemo- logical peace—regardless of how fragile or exclusionary they have ever been (Chakrabarty 2000)—have given room to a civil war in and of history. Diagnostics about “the crisis” are indeed many, typed hurriedly in the age of new media. But although hyperexcited, the public sphere has become entirely opaque to republican or liberal self-abstraction (Rocha and Medeiros 2021; Warner 2005). It is a battleground in which all stances are deemed ideologically overloaded from the beginning. They drag the interpreter within the war as historical arguments morph into weapons and schemes. Everyone, like postmodern philoso- phers, talks about “narratives.” There is no longer room for a historical hors-texte. Sahlins’s (1985:x) culturalist axiom for a historical anthropology—“different cultures, different histo- ricities”—cannot do the trick, either. If I do not know when we are, I cannot dare to say when “a culture” starts or ends, no less than “a society.” Deep historical dissent especially concerns recent past events—the 2013 mass protests, Dilma Rousseff ’s impeach- ment, Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava-Jato), Lula’s im- prisonment, Jair Bolsonaro’s elections, and Lula’s release. But, like a temporal earthquake, it has affected deeper temporal layers (Koselleck 2018), events once considered sedimented (at least according to schoolbooks), certainly the 1964 military coup, but even the 1889 Proclamation of the Republic and the 1822 independence. Dead political movements inspired by a deep past, such as Ação Integralista Brasileira, the largest fascist party outside Europe in the 1930s, and even monar- chism have come back to life. Although still minor, they signal to a much more diffuse desire to move beyond (and before) the liberal democratic consensus established since the early 1980s (Hatzikidi and Dullo 2021), including its historical canon. And so does the major political force that propelled us into such a temporal vortex: bolsonarismo, the local breed of a global far-right movement whose North American ver- sion has been aptly called “aspirational fascism” by William Connolly (2017). Bruno Reinhardt is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Campus Universitário Reitor João David Ferreira Lima, Trindade, Florianópolis, SC 88040-90 Brazil [bmnreinhardt@gmail.com]). This paper was submitted 3 III 22, accepted 17 I 23, and electronically published 30 IV 25. 1. The manuscript was submitted in March 2022, revised in September 2022, and accepted in January 2023. Much of the original meaning of the deictic “today” in this sentence referred to Brazil under Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s presidency, but not only that. Since January 1, 2023, he is no longer the president. I opted to keep the original manuscript’s time markers, reflecting my affective and temporal orientations while writing it, as these are also the article’s main themes. Current Anthropology allowed me to add a postscript about the 2022 election and the events that followed it in January 2023. Current Anthropology, volume 66, number 3, June 2025. q 2025 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. https://doi.org/10.1086/735570