politics

Abstract

Insofar as we acknowledge that “politics” makes reference to what is common and that it pervades our whole lives,some crucial questions arise: what is politics? Where is it and how could it be characterized? How could we identifythe political dimension of our relationships, within contemporary societies? The aim of the article is to offer someelements in order to answer these questions highlighting different perspectives about the topic, from that whichclaims that power and conflict are the main constitutive elements of politics to that which opposes the idea ofpolitics as administering some kind of order to the idea of politics as a certain type of action that questions, contestsand subverts the grounds of such order. These viewpoints, and some complementary ones, are of the mostimportance to establish that politics is contingent, that is, that politics is always on the making.