No One Can Hold It Back

Abstract

The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in water’s oscillations between non-life and the divine. Exploring these oscillations in a dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia, I argue that they allowed a flooding phenomenon on a river threatened with damming to be heard as a prophetic call to action. The uprising that followed produced a rare victory for dam opponents, suggesting that a theopolitics of life has powers that exceed vitalism.