What the State of Nature Hath Joined Together: Bolsonarismo as Horizon and Machine

Analyses of fascism often evoke an excessive tendency that pulls it beyond the very possibility of its normalization as a political order. This essay suggests that reading a phenomenon like Bolsonarismo through this prism simultaneously identifies something true about its vision and misrecognizes some key aspects of its organization and internal functioning. Attention to the latter—particularly the role played by what the author describes as “political entrepreneurs”—allows us to understand contemporary far-right agitation in Brazil as a machine to both stimulate and contain excess. Thus, while the Bolsonarista horizon could be described as something like a differentially distributed state of nature, this is not so much some extreme outside of politics than something a lot more continuous with conditions already in existence. This, finally, makes it possible to place the January 8, 2023, attack on Brasília in context.