ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that Atacamenos and poor miners alike are culturally and politically capitalized and programmed as exclusive 'relic' identities that, far from being collective in their territorial knowledge practices. It focuses on the social causes and effects of the legal and bodily imaginations that are born out of the interrelations commoditized and racialized by mainstream media. As Foucault asserts, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable', since only racism can serve as 'the precondition for exercising the right to kill' of the state. The understanding of the fetishistic, instrumentally aesthetic power of law to 'let live' was first highlighted by Foucault and later realigned with sovereign 'power to kill', following theorization of necropolitics. It argues that the modern water divide hinges together socio-natural differentiation processes that in turn fetishize the rationalist culture dichotomy at the structural root of unequal access to justice-like water-in the Desert, as poor and corruptly managed by state.
