“Habit of Habitance: The Custom of Montréal” by Dr. Viktor Kropotkin:
Habitance is the quality of a thing which inhabits a place, and of that space being inhabited by same said thing. Habitance, therefore, is inherent in all habitats, whether or not these same habitats are being inhabited — filled! — by any number of accidental-contingent, existent thing.
Habitance , though, is meant to be the particular manner of inhabiting, of habitation, of the Habitant people, in the St-Lawrence Lowlands and the Seigniorial System of land distribution, in history, in North America. Habitance, then, is said to be the special “thrownness” of the Habitant people.
Habitance represents the historical and metaphysical condition of the Habitant people. Unique in human history, the Habitant people are a colony doubly colonized, colonized and re-colonized: A French colony was re-appropriated by a British Imperial-colonial power, and machinic, military complex.
Habitance, then, also means to give a voice to, to make sense of, the condition of an entire people. This people, the Québécois Nation, suffers from a “historical” disorder or “Lowland Sickness”, called in this case also a “character depression”.
It is said that, “Montréal is an Elsewhere,” and this was so upon its capitulation, which always gives rise to a “capitulation anxiety” (in a polity undergoing capitulation and experiencing its long, complicated aftermath).
In a similar vein, the Habitant people are “exiled within their (own) homes/Homeland,” and their land, that is, their entire State apparatus was re-appropriated by British conquerors who had gone beyond the call of duty, to capture this slain people: When martial law laid claim to the boundaries of its enclosure in the prison-state, the Prison-State with its eerie, dark hinterlands demarcating the confines of capitulated nationals.
Historical Therapy is how a people affected with a historical, geographic “logopathy”, or “logical pathology”, can transcend its states of abjection, subjection, and sharpened sensations of the alienation of the common mind. Historical Therapy is a form of active “disalienation”, a sympathetic participation in the rekindling of the life of a people and its spirit, awareness.)
The Québécois people, having been stripped of its ownership of itself, its people, and its places, is as nation, DISINCARNATE. It has been expatriated from its own Patrimony. Habitance, ergo, is the genetic sense (genosense) of Québécois life for four centuries, Life the Habitant way, with its unique, incorruptible language, culture, metaphysical reality, and crumby sense of humor!
The Québécois Nation exists and cannot cease to exist. She must be recognized as sovereign by the international community, and helped by these same nation-states, towards a curatorial healing or doctoring, to be freed from her shackles, from her chains, helped in lifting the burden of her coercion and her own self-imposed, sickened narration of hundreds of years of North American History.
Help her tell the human story full of sense and signifying everything! It is evil to expect a people to remain sick with that “Lowland Sickness”, of the “Lowland Consciousness”. She, the Québec, must be given freedom to fend off her foes, and tend to her own governance, and free her economically to tend to her fate as a power to be reckoned with in the world.
Choicism is the answer and the prescription to these kinds of deep historical problems whose indelibility is all too flagrant and a great irritation to a people: That inability to shake off the pain, the grief and loss of human capital and real capital, of being stripped bare by a conquering nation, of being forbidden to practise one’s religion and speak one’s language. Historicists are keen on forgetting these travesties.
But we live in tragic times, and so our awareness is imbibed with tragedy. This is a good thing, for it can awaken many to the truth at the center of it all, of a great people and a very sick people in this instance. Choicism is a prescription that can heal the Québécois nation and reawaken its national spirit of tenderness and proud of the responsible voluntary wish of always seeing to the greatest caretaking of its own.
The Québécois people is affected with national DISINCARNATION, tantamount to a silent genocide. Her intention is to answer the call to rise to perceived greatness in the world, through free market economies and only the highest and greatest of spirits — and heart of infinite resolve — of diplomacy, competitive sportsmanship, compassion, self-correction, betterment, the list goes on, humility, etc.
“Elle est digne de notre amour. Esto perpetua, may she endure forever!” — Author Unknown
Sincerely,
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
