“the passion of the real”

“the passion of the real” describes a drive to reach the Real through direct experience or action rather than through established forms of social and political mediation. The book gives the expression two connected settings: the turn toward immediate experience after the political hopes of 1968 had run their course, and the effort to force an evental truth onto reality. In both, immediacy promises a way through an impasse, but risks replacing engagement with a pursuit of the Real that cannot be fully mastered.

Historical Emergence

The book locates this drive at a specific political juncture: the mid-1970s, when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential. It describes the turn that followed as a passage from political exhaustion toward direct action and inner experience. Rather than treating the turn as a single movement, it distinguishes three forms: the pursuit of extreme sexual pleasure, Leftist political terrorism, and an inward turn to Oriental mysticism.

The grouping does not make these forms identical. Their shared feature, as the passage presents it, is a retreat from concrete sociopolitical engagement toward immediate contact with the Real. The expression therefore names not simply a hunger for intensity, but a response to a historical impasse: when the prior emancipatory project seemed spent, direct experience could appear to offer a way past the limits of ordinary political critique.

Political Action and Inner Experience

The political form is exemplified by the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. Their wager, as the book characterizes it, was that the masses had become so immersed in capitalist ideological sleep that standard critique of ideology could no longer awaken them. Direct violence was conceived as an intervention capable of breaking through that condition. The text presents this as a turn toward the raw force of immediate action, not as a successful resolution of the political problem it sought to address.

The other routes shift the pursuit of immediacy away from organized political violence. Extreme forms of sexual pleasure seek an experience beyond ordinary social ties; Oriental mysticism seeks the Real through inward experience. Set beside terrorism, these routes expose the breadth of the same response to political exhaustion: the search for an unmediated encounter, whether through bodily pleasure, violence, or mystical practice. The book’s emphasis falls on their common withdrawal from concrete sociopolitical engagement, not on an equivalence between their methods or consequences.

Forcing Truth and Its Limit

The expression also connects to Alain Badiou’s notion of forcing: imposing an evental truth on reality. The book frames this as an attempt to make reality conform to a truth that resists full realization. Where reality stands in the way, forcing can become destructive, making the pursuit of the Real inseparable from the danger of coercively remaking what does not yield to the project.

Badiou’s appeal to the Un-nameable marks a limit to that danger. It prevents evental truth from being fully actualized and thus restrains the drive to force reality into complete conformity. But the book treats forcing and refusal of full actualization not as clean alternatives: they are two sides of the same constellation. The passion of the real consequently carries a structural tension. It is the effort to break through the limits of an existing order, yet the demand for direct realization encounters what cannot be absorbed into the truth being imposed.