One very interesting addition to the public space is how we are conditioning and defining the public space with regards to eventual attacks. And it’s changing the landscape radically. And the very first knee-jerk reaction was concrete blocks in front of many institutions. Now they’re trying to design these concrete blocks so they seem something which is part of the landscape but the presence and the robustness is still so violent that it’s hard to hide the intention.
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I suppose Foucault has to be credited with talking about disposable life. And it’s interesting to me that at the very moment when he was giving the lectures on this topic, Henry Kissinger in the United States was admitting, or publishing, the results of the commission on sterilization. The idea was that sterilization should be encouraged in Third World countries in order to regulate the population.
When you try to analyze the resacralization of the secular state system, there are many mistakes that scholars particularly in the West make. They assume that resacralization is simply secularism plus the sacred added on. As if the system was still conceived in the same way, even it wishes to behave in a different way. But what in fact is going on is fragmentary, a mixture.