In this article, the author proposes to analyze and translate, through a semiotic and semantic exercise, the meaning of the terms that indicate and express the first principles of the Aristotelian political logos. The analysis will focus on chapters 1-6 of the third book of Politics, where Aristotle models and remodels the fundamental notions of his political philosophy and, more specifically, their sequences of definitions and inter-definitions. The primitive terms that appear since the beginning of the book are three: polis, polites, politeia. In some passages a fourth term is added to them, politikos, an adjective turned into noun. A further term emerges to complete the series, although with a more controversial meaning, politeuma. All of these terms exhibit an air of family, since they share the same root: poli-; but, when these terms are being translated into modern languages, this common
root is usually fragmented and even dissolved. For the most part, we translate polis with «city», but city as a state, in the broadest and most general meaning, we translate polites with «citizen», politeia with «constitution», politeuma with «government». But state, citizen, constitution, government —as phonemes— have no semiotic relationship, they show no family air. The author suggests to try restoring, even in modern translations, the unity of the linguistic family upon which Aristotle constructs his fundamental notions. Consequently, he proposes a range of possible translations, as follows: Polis as political institution, political entity, political collectivity, collective political subject; polites as individual political subject, member of the political collective; politeia as «politicy», political form, political identity; politeuma as political body, political class, political organ. This way, says the author, one is able to give a more precise meaning to the definitions and interdefinitions of Aristotle and to correct many misunderstandings that are hidden in the current ways of translating the terms, as well as to dissolve certain ambiguities and sometimes even implausibility of the resulting expressions. Moreover, the author insists that these are polysemic terms: the set of connotations and denotations associated with their (multiple) uses make each of them a «stem» notion, which contains in nuce, dynamei, a range of possibilities for different semantic specializations and conjugations, just like stem cells that biologists call «multipotent».
However, he upholds that restoring kinship (also) at a semiotic level between these notions does not at all multiply the ambiguity, but rather that it can contribute to the clarification of one notion with the other, as well as reestablish plausibility and sensitivity to the different specialized meanings of the terms just by bringing them back to a single stock. The author tests the effectiveness of his semiotic-semantic suggestions by proposing a re-translation of some canonical passage, in which Aristotle engages with the definition and inter-definition of fundamental terms. The first is the famous incipit of the third book of Politics, in which the first four terms appear in a network of inter-definitions, followed by the re-translation and the more detailed analysis of the steps dedicated to the figure of the polites, the «individual political subject», in which the author points out a specific ambiguity
of the Aristotelian discourse. Then the author examines the semantic oscillations within the uses of politeia, between the formal and the material definition of the «political identity» of the polis. Finally, the author offers a reconstruction of the nexus between politeia and politeuma, that is, between «political identity» and «political body».