The plague narrates the stories of a group of men whose lives interconnect around the experience of exile during the event of a plague. This article selects and summarizes themes from each of their stories. The purpose of these selections is to present an interpretation of Camus’ narratives that can be juxtaposed to an analysis, overleaf, of the educational nature of narratives, and in particular of the event of the tragedy. This article then maps out the narrative of the town (...) and of seven men. It may be read alone as a reading of Camus’ novel with rich, yet unmapped, contributions to thinking about education, or it may be read concurrently with its analytical partner through which the meaning of Camus’ work is traced onto a contemporary tragedy and a city’s educational responses. (shrink)

Problem setting. The contemporary sociopolitical reality reflects high dynamics of the cultural development and features uncertainty, insecurity unexpectedness, transfer and fragmentation. These conditions transform the traditional views on social and political practices, revisiting individual understanding of identity. To describe cultural process peculiarities, social and humanitarian sciences actively use the performative approach, which allows researchers to focus on the underlying force of human actions and the way they generate cultural senses. While studying social and political actors a major theme is the (...) phenomenon of masses, which testifies to significant changes in political discourse, in particular, the destruction of the traditional channels of political expression. Recent research and publications analysis. In today’s conditions of the crisis in interpretation there is a trend to go beyond the meaning and address trans-semiotic elements of the human existence. The process of rethinking the mankind discursive interpretation and sense genesis opens a way to corporeality theories that enable to reproduce subjective experience in the performative paradigm. The study of performatives and their potential to create socially and politically meaningful effects is a promising and insufficiently developed field of research. Paper objective. The research discusses the phenomenon of corporeality as a new practice of political self-expression within the performative approach. Paper main body. The study is devoted to the contemporary research into the problems of corporeality and its role in the political discourse. Structural and post-structural philosophy understands reality as a text and, respectively, focuses on the communicative role of the language and the interpretational nature of human-world relations. This semiotic discourse substitutes the sense with meaning. It was shown that the discourse approach, based on the link between the world and the language, interpretations, exchange of meanings and their production in the human world building does not consider the opportunities of the trans-semiotic experience. It was confirmed that the conceptualization of new political practices in the conditions of world rewriting by itself is a most important theme in the modern philosophy and it sets the task to search for new approaches to the issue of a political subject as an agent. It was demonstrated that one of these approaches emerges in the theory of performativity. Under the conditions of corporal communication a performance is the means of personality expression, the way to enter communication, which implies certain attitude and understanding from other communicators. The paper deals with the prospect of considering political issues, given in the performative paradigm and followed in the works by Judith Butler, and other researchers of the new political realm. It was particularly shown that the body as a discursive field always has a political perspective. Therefore, the work dwells on the concepts of gathering, power, precarity, democracy, justice, sources of corporeality politicization etc. It was emphasized that the phenomenon of going out into the street, caused by the vulnerability and dramatism of personal stories, requires considering such motives, and also reflecting on the conditions and ways of accepting political attitude on the whole. Conclusions of the research. The conventional political articulation is being replaced by the density of corporeality and performance, which is, in turn, becoming a new driver of political processes. One of the versions of the political subject is gathering unlike masses, parties and people. This approach outlines a broad field of research into the new political language for contemporary political practices. (shrink)