Secular states treat only the abstract human as sacred, not living persons.

Evidence

Hannah Arendt, writing at about the same time as Malcolm X gave his speech, observed that human rights depended essentially on being citizens of a nation-state: “The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based—that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula)—could have helped to find a solution to the problem.” Arendt might have noted, however, that sacredness in the modern secular state is attributed not to real living persons but precisely to “the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature. Every real person who belongs to a particular nation-state is always subject to its institutional violence—including the violence of its law, and liable to military conscription that can result in his death. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the common assumption that secular modernity locates the sacred in actual human beings; connects to Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and tensions with the author’s own interest in sacrifice’s sacred dimension.