The 2012 Quebec Student's Movement in the Nationalist Political Thought: When Nation Hijacks Political Subjectivity (original) (raw)

This paper analyse how the nationalist critique of Quebec student's movement is built into a conceptual framework which contains conservative implications. Both conservative and left factions relies on the assumption of a « common world » shaped by national culture and embodied into institutionnal forms, such as the nation-state and the law, that neoliberalism allegedly threathens. While conservatives criticise the student's direct democratic praxis by opposing it a state falsely personifying the universality of common good, the left depicts nation-state and national culture as tools that could protect society agaisnt the breakdown of social bonds inherent to neoliberalism. By doing so, nationalists are placing the oppositional political subjectivity born in student's movement outside it's own realm, subjecting it to an abstract entity that hides but reproduce the structuration of society along class, race and gender lines.