This contribution presents an attempt to get to the roots of a phenomenon that the author
denotes as the ambiguity of the attribution "political". Current political science debates dealing
with the term "the political" mostly revolve around the delimitation of the political against either
the state or the society. They seem therefore not to capture two essential connotations attached
to describing something as political - two connotations which are, as the author argues,
pervading all theoretical as well as commonplace reflections. These systematic meanings or
suggestions are recognisable independently from what kind of definition of the political is being
put forward. Therefore, an inquiry dealing with, primarily, the way the attribution "political" is
being applied and not with the explicit definitions themselves is what is undertaken in this
article. The author uses the term "ambiguity" to manifest the fact that it is not instantaneously
clear which of the two meanings is implied when the word "political" is used - moreover, these
two stand in a tense relation to each other. To denominate this tension, the author suggests the
designation "polemical-normative". She illustrates her proposition by analysing a selection of
texts of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The inquiry leads to two main insights. First, that the
common denominator "polemical-normative" is of quite a limited explanatory value. It is so
because both parts of it carry a set of attributes within them which, on their own, describe the
way Schmitt and Strauss used the word "political" more precisely than the common
denominator itself. Nevertheless, the idea of a structural ambiguity inherent to the ways we
denote something as political does not lose its ground. Second, a fundamental connection of
theoretical nature between the two meanings comes to sight. This suggests that we, when
thinking about the political, cannot avoid the contradiction inherent to this term - a
contradiction which revokes itself partly, but never completely.
