The Real Quotes

“Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.”
― Alain Badiou

“...when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the rel of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, a facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

“What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“So many people will debate and argue about the nature of God, but all the philosophy books in the world are no substitute for genuine personal experience with the Real. The Real is the Radiance of Your Existence and the Expression of Everything. For Allah emanates through all Creation in Divine Resplendence and with Divine Grace.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“All feelings of completeness are tragic.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“[T]he Real has no substantial reality in itself since it is an immanent self-impediment of the Symbolic itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed