W.B.Gallie and William E. Connolly sought to explain why central political concepts, including ‘politics’ itself, are inherently susceptible to endless dispute over their meaning and range of application. When a concept is ‘appraisive’, denoting a valued activity; when it is internally complex, referring to a cluster of different dimensions; and when its rules of application are relatively open and an object of disagreement themselves, then the concept is ‘essentially contested’. It is obvious that ‘politics’ qualifies as such. Politics implicates many different dimensions, including collective decision-making, legally binding authority, interests, conflict, negotiation, public administration, government and power, which are themselves internally complex and fuzzy. And people will dissent over whether sexuality, mathematics and religion are, or should be, political issues subject to public decision-making. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

Hence, a reasonable construal of the political should, first, remain alert to its historical limitations and its contestable validity, rather than make any pretence to universal truth. Second, it should be informed by a historicized hermeneutics that puts forth context-bound interpretations, taking its cues from the contingent, contextual ideas about politics, while testing their bounds and creatively recalibrating them. Third, one should reckon with the diversity and the contentiousness of political positions and acts, while also acknowledging the openness of political action to the radically new. Finally, a pluralist and self-reflective conception of the political should closely attend to actual social conditions, and it should dialogically interact with the arena of mainstream politics as well as with grassroots civic activity and critical thinking. In a nutshell, a qualified, contextualized, plural and open notion of the political should remain alive to a tradition of political thought that was championed by Hand J. Morgenthau in 1933: ‘The concept of the political does not have a fixed content which can be determined once and for all’. ‘The political nature of these matters thus depends on circumstances of time and place and does not result from a ground of principle’. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

[…] ‘the political’ bears on social activity that deliberatively intervenes in existing social relations, structures and embedded subjectivities in order to shape them intentionally by challenging them, transfiguring them, displacing them, managing them or defending them against challenges. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

In exemplary fashion, the famous feminist motto “the personal is political” intended to convey an idea that was scandalous in the 1960s: that there are “political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work” (Rosen in Lee 2007:163). […] “The personal is political” means, also, that pervasive cultural norms and social and economic structures are enacted and reproduced through individual action (Butler 1988:522). The feminist movement worked out schemes of political thought and action in line with this politicization of the everyday. It favoured modes of civic engagement that involved “average” women in their everyday lives. The emblematic practice of “consciousness-raising” that has been nurtured in feminist groups purported to empower women politically in their personal relations and life worlds. This process of critical group-thinking embodies a dynamic way of politicizing the personal and a singular modality of politics in the “everyday”. By way of sharing personal experiences and through collective discussion around shared feelings and concerns, it stimulated reflection on the political facets of personal life. Consciousness-raising thus enhanced awareness of everyday oppression. It boosted the self-esteem of women as persons who bring their distinct contribution to politics by cherishing, for example, values of sensitivity and care for the others. It also investigated ways of initiating change in patriarchal norms and subjectivities, in the present tense and from below. Hence, feminist politics intimated the idea that individual acts can be political in the mundane reality of gender relations inasmuch as they recycle cultural conventions of subordination or they undertake to displace and upset them (Hanisch 2006; Butler 1988: 523-4; Lee 2007: 165-6) Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.123

There is a plurality of realms. Of realms that are all the more real because they are shared. And that coexist. Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Anonymous, Call, p.7

"Politique" should never have become a noun. It should have remained an adjective. An attribute, and not a substance. There are conflicts, there are encounters, there are actions, there are speech interventions that are "political," because they make a decisive stand against something in a given situation, and because they express an affirmation concerning the world they desire. Political is that which bursts forth, which forms an event, which punches a hole in the orderly progression of the disaster. That which provokes polarization, drawing a line, choosing sides. […] Everything is political that relates to the encounter, the friction, or the conflict between forms of life, between regimes of perception, between sensibilities, between worlds once this contact attains a certain threshold of intensity. The crossing of this threshold is signaled immediately by its effects: frontlines are drawn, friendships and enmities are affirmed, cracks appear in the uniform surface of the social, there is a splitting apart of what was falsely joined together and subsurface communications between the different resulting fragments. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.61-62

We need to abandon the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program, project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made, and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The nearby doesn't mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local. It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar-the prehensible and comprehensible. It's not a spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being neighbors doesn't always make us close. It's only.from contact that the friend and the enemy are discovered. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.65