Populism, Enjoyment, and the Competition for Partisan Visibility in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua

This article follows efforts by a pirate taxi cooperative in Nicaragua to make themselves visible as Sandinista partisans in the hopes of being granted legal licenses to operate in a context where the dominant political logic of the state is a populist one. It examines how populism transforms the conditions in which subjects can come to appear in front of the state to make a claim, giving way to a dynamic of competition for partisan visibility as the means to access recognition. I argue that the competition for visibility becomes the context for subjects to experience what Yannis Stavrakakis has called “jouissance of the body,” which fosters investments in Sandinismo as a political project even when it fails to fulfill its promises. Here, enjoyment manifests in the schadenfreude of witnessing the other’s disgrace, the elation of provoking another’s envy, and the ecstatic abandon of fantasizing (and at times giving in to the fantasies) of beating up the enemy that is standing in the way of the materialization of one’s aspirations. I conclude by showing how tending to these sites of enjoyment can help us rethink how we understand the adversarialism at the heart of populist politics, enabling us to see how it operates from the bottom up.