ABSTRACT
The sacredness of water inheres in its multiple functions and meanings: in its primordial origins as Gangetic water, as the ritual medium of cleansing pollution, and as privatized resource. Profaning the sacred object results in simple empirical 'proof' of the emptiness of the edict of religious prohibition, both as to its ineffectiveness and as to its inconsequentiality. Environmental activists and academics have understandably therefore begun to urge a return to a pre-modern, non-European epistemology and practice of the sacred as an antidote to the commodification of natural resources and its consequent ecological problems. There is however a long Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself, of reading capitalism as analogous to a religion, based on the fusion of the commodity with sacred object. In his essay Profanations Giorgio Agamben offers a productive and provocative reading of capitalism's commodity fetishism in continuation of Marx, Benjamin and Debord.
