The Helsinki Notebooks

Fascism is a form of what Mark Fisher, among others, calls “hauntology,”: the study of the ghost’s accumulated movements and chaotic drifts. Hauntology understands the ghost “not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.”¹ For Fisher specifically, haunting is a kind of unhappiness that wouldn’t otherwise have a name.

Rather than searching for the real Fascism and developing rubrics to identify it (which always seems to betray a desire for the real Fascism rather than Trump’s demented pastiche version), we might instead study the ghost’s unhappy drift in and out of the sites it haunts without physically existing in neither a single mask, nor in a specific historical event. The anti-fascist task ahead is to track the circulation of the wound as it subdivides itself, fumbling, tripping, and jumping from body to body, host to host.

Fascism merely names the body that surfaces the ghost. Fascism is not only the death camps themselves but also the body that grows out of the edges of the camps. There is no Fascist history except in an ongoing bio-political project, an affective regime. There is no history, no spiritual or economic crisis, that does not happen to the body.

There is no fascist beginning, only the present tense of a ghost story that transforms the past into all that’s regrettable and turns the future into everything not yet regretted. The ghost’s malevolent present tense throws its past as well as its future into too late. To be haunted is to live in the ghost’s present tense of too late. The ghost measures you by the extent to which you become worthy of its injuries in a world that surfaces along the edges of the killing blow.

No hierarchy of detail in haunting; no telling, only showing; no history, only the collapse of the vibrancy of human history into the monochrome of too late. As Hazel Motes, the preacher of the church without Christ (the only possible preacher of a “Christ-haunted south”) in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood preaches: “where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”² There’s no tense of Fascism but too late. There is no returning to the nostalgic fascism of the past; no return of any real Fascism, nor an original wound, only the chaotic surface of emergence of death along the edges of the ghost’s wound.

Fascism merely names the process of circulating woundedness throughout the world. There is no locus of fascism except in dislocation, no subjectivity but in the body’s becoming-dislocated and becoming-haunted in the present tense of too late. In feeling fascist, the haunted body lays claim to the ghost that lays waste to them. In fascist affect, the haunted body reproduces the structure of the wound in which all fascist feelings are prefigured.

Here is a ghost story: lookmaxxing, a masochistic practice of aesthetic self-improvement rooted in the bio-politics of white supremacy and eugenics, wherein members engage in self-mutilation, rigorous practices of mortification, and even methamphetamine, often involves a technique called “bonesmashing.”³ The bonesmasher repeatedly hits themselves in the jaw with a hammer to achieve a more perfect jawline. Yes, there is more to Aryanness than blonde hair and blue eyes. Blonde hair and blues eyes name only one simulacrum of the ghost’s tortured face. Here, Fascism surfaces neither on the scalp nor the iris, but rather on the jaw, as though mastering the world as the master race were as simple and crude as chewing on it.

Rather than asking what Fascism is, we might instead ask what it feels like. Fascism is a form of collective-making, yet it is a collective made not from shared goals but from shared nullifications and self-denials.⁴ Certainly, when the looksmaxxers hit themselves with hammers, they aren’t the only ones holding hammers. There’s no injury like hope, no sin like kindness, no disappointment like joy. After all, a smile “risks having to survive, once again, disappointment and depression, the protracted sense that nothing will change and that no-one, especially oneself, is teachable after all.”⁵ The looksmaxxers will expose kindness once and for all. They’ll prove that “vulnerability makes you worthless: survival depends on producing forms of hardened identity” and punishing “the soft remainders” in the soft, round, fatty jaws of the so-called wokes, in their kindly neighbor who leaves their trash can out when it isn’t trash day, in Cracker Barrel changing its logo, in Starbucks cups that aren’t holly jolly enough, in Superman going “woke,” in Bad Bunny halftimes shows, and so on.⁶

To become singularly-Aryan is to become multiply disappointed. Fascism is a big, deadly shrug, another bad case of the Mondays, and another bout of the Sunday Scaries in the predominantly white suburbs. “Who could imagine that they would freak out somehwere in Kansas,” asks Frank Zappa (who called the United States “fascist theocracy” to a panel of laughs and sneers on a 1986 episode of CNN’s crossfire) in “It Can’t Happen Here” (1966). “Who could imagine that they would freak out in the suburbs?” After all, “they had a swimming pool.”⁷ Zappa’s foil and hated enemy, Lou Reed, answers on his woefully underappreciated album The Bells (1979) that “freaking out” in the suburbs was always sort of pre-figured in its affective infrastructure. Reed sings that “families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry,” as though it’s always been both an ironic surprise and totally obvious that the middle-classes cry sometimes.⁸

Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, the preeminent DIY musician of middle-class bedrooms, suggests that the middle is sort of always crying. It’s just that the freak out is so low-frequency, it barely makes a sound. On “Boxing Day” (2013) Toledo sings:

There’s no collective, only “peeping toms” who don’t care about what they’ve come to see. The question ahead is how the middle class, in which enlightenment invested so much capital and so much philosophy, strips itself to the nude and get haunted, bonesmashing in a pair of Target-brand boxers. We must not ask how someone could be so misinformed and so ignorant that they would embrace Fascism, but rather how they could be so haunted.

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1. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero books, 2013), 30. ↩︎
2. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 165; Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 44. ↩︎
3. Elle Hunt, “The Disturbing Rise of Clavicular: How a Looksmaxxer Turned His ‘Horror Story’ into Fame,” The Guardian, February 18, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/18/foid-looksmaxxer-manosphere-influencer-braden-peters-aka-clavicular. ↩︎
4. Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Common Notions, 2022), 31. ↩︎
5. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 171. ↩︎
6. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 182. ↩︎
7. Zappa, Frank. “It Can’t Happen Here.” Freak Out!. Verve Records, 1966. ↩︎
8. Reed, Lou. “Families.” The Bells. Arista Records, 1980. ↩︎
9. Car Seat Headrest, Boxing Day, Nervous Young Man, Self-released, 2013. ↩︎

To cite this article:

Cooper Casale, ‘The Present Tense of Too Late: Fascist Affect,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 12 (15 April 2026).

The Present Tense of Too Late: Fascist Affect © 2026 by Cooper Casale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Feature Image: 

Shirtless Man with Arm Raised in Fascist Salute with Superimposed Cross, Circle, and Spray of Flowers – photograph by Mario Castagneri (MET, 1987.1100.456)