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Yesterday's Grope and Wail (Oct. 21) has an article "Sovereignty central to campaign: Bouchard" in which Mr. Bouchard is quoted as saying "We also came out weakened . . . after the 1995 referendum, where we have since witnessed an unprecedented assault by the federal government on Quebec's sacred jurisdictions." I'm becoming interested in the use (or abuse) of theistic language in profane contexts. After Descartes, Mark C. Taylor says, all philosophy became a "philosophy of the subject," and "attributes traditionally predicated of the divine subject [were] gradually transferred to the human subject." In Quebec, the nationalist "project" seems to me to have taken a theistic (or faux-sacred) bent, an almost perfect "displacement," it appears, of the conservative religious orthodoxy that held in Quebec until the 50s or 60s, with the telos being some kind of apotheosis. Post-modernism is the "sovereignty of language" replacing the "sovereignty of self-conscious subjectivity" (Taylor). Which may (cf George Steiner) lead to a "crisis of language." And of course there's always that slippery but indicative "we" (nous): "We" have been weakened; humiliate "us" etc. The "we" isn't a civil society we, it's a . . . well, that's where a examination of communities (discursive, social, invoked, linguistic, etc.) might get interesting. (I've just finished Never Without Consent, a Cree manifesto and critique of separatism. It's a lucid book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the future of Quebec. It will make you do a double take each time you hear Bouchard or Parizeau say "we.") Given the theme of Inkshed 16, an examination of the rhetoric of "sovereigntists" (itself an interesting word) might be a fruitful topic. I'd be happy to converse further with anyone about this. Jamie MacKinnon [log in to unmask] 613 782 7124