“The Political” versus/and Synonymous Terms. An Attempt to Analyse a Theoretical Discourse
“The Political” versus/and Synonymous Terms. An Attempt to Analyse a Theoretical Discourse

Summary/Abstract: The paper is an attempt to reconstruct the theoretical discourse on the strat- egy of using the notion of “the political” and related notions in Polish political theory. The author argues that these concepts, appearing in large numbers in recent years, are not an expression of pointless terminological disputes, but an attempt to cope with the complex character of various political phenomena that are the result of dynamic pro- cesses of the politicisation of various previously non-political problems of collective life. The text discusses two ways of understanding “the political” that dominate among Pol- ish political scientists: as an aspect of various political phenomena in conventionally un- derstood politics and beyond, and as a category that allows one to name the fundamen- tal principles through which society as a whole and its various parts (e.g. social classes) are formed. The text also discusses three strategies for searching for synonymous terms in relations to politics and “the political”: (1) attempts to find a superordinate category; (2) transformations of the notion of “the political” through various clarifications (e.g. or- ganic politics) and prefixes (e.g. meta-politics); (3) orientation towards borderline phe- nomena (e.g. quasi-political ones) in the context of processes of politicisation and de- politicisation that allow for a continuous reconfiguration of the boundaries of what is political.

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