The Katechon and the Messias

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.