This essay constitutes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about identity in Quebec.Quebec Identitycrystallizes what has, until now, been an inchoate change of course taking place in our society. Many Quebecers of all ages, but especially members of the younger generations, have come to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the polarized, dogmatic confrontation between sovereigntists and federalists. Despite the continuous tallying of economic advantages and disadvantages on either side of the question, everyone has always implicitly understood that the debate is not fundamentally about economics but, rather, identity.

While one side would claim that Quebecers can only resolve...

Identity as a topic gets a lot of copy; a great many writers and theorists, in Quebec and elsewhere, have made it their muse. University disciplines and theoretical approaches intertwine and overlap as they endeavour to map out the terrain, to chart a course for us through the labyrinth of contemporary identity. Thus philosophy, political science, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, geography, literary studies, and cultural studies, as well as hermeneutic, phenomenological, neo-Kantian, Marxist, feminist, post-colonialist, and post-structuralist approaches, all cross-fertilize and refute one another in a grand enterprise of conceptual exploration. Later in this introduction, I will attempt to discern...

There exists in Quebec a whole discourse about the fragility, the precariousness, the tragic existence, the fatigue, the modesty, the phillistinism, the mediocrity, the immaturity, and the indecision of the Québécois people. Those who intone this sombre national chant are drinking from a stream with many confluents. By searching a little and by adopting a certain relationship to the past, one can indeed find in the genesis of Quebec society, as well as in its recent history, the fuel for a major depression – or more precisely, a case of collective melancholia. In Freud’s terms, melancholia is experienced as a kind...

It will be recalled that “emergence from self-imposed immaturity” was the answer given by Immanuel Kant to the question “What is enlightenment?” Mature and enlightened individuals and peoples, wrote the German philosopher, are those who are able to guide themselves by their own lights. In this definition one recognizes the ideal of autonomy, the cornerstone of the Kantian critical philosophy. Now, the resemblance between Québécois nationalism and German romanticism has often been noted and can hardly be doubted. The search for authenticity that drives Québécois nationalism, at least those variants studied in chapter 1, undeniably draws a large part of...

To this point in our exploratory mapping of the interpretations of identity in Quebec, we have examined a discourse in which the Québécois are stigmatized by their past, idling on the margins of History, grasping interminably after normality and maturity; a depressive Quebec, with the occasional stirrings of consciousness, but otherwise comfortably numb; a would-be nation in a state of constant vigil. This psychodramatic historical narrative has long served as a reference point for a broad range of intellectuals, artists, politicians, and others wishing to render the Québécois experience a little more intelligible and meaningful. But as they engage in...

The Quebec social imaginary, as we have seen, is besieged by identity representations drawn from melancholy nationalism and cosmopolitanism anti-nationalism. However, these two paradigmatic codes do not exhaust the possibilities. Other voices are speaking up to worry, problematize, throw a wrench into, this perennial opposition. Besides Laforest and Létourneau, intellectuals and writers such as Sherry Simon, Pierre Nepveu, Marco Micone, Monique LaRue, Mikhäel Elbaz, Simon Harel, Danielle Juteau, and Daniel Salée, to name just a few, all think and talk about Quebec outside the nationalism-anti-nationalism dichotomy. Quebec is increasingly being told as a dissensual, plural community of conversation in which...