Abstract

While he develops three different aspects of Lacan's “Real,” Slavoj Žižek does so only partially, in the end leaving an inconsistent and contradictory account. Here these three versions of the Real are outlined and clarified by showing their relation to Marx's account of capitalist exchange and socialist politics. This leads to a discussion of two other aspects of the Real that appear in Žižek's work: the pre-Symbolic Real and the “Sinthome.” Where the former is simultaneously the fear of a unified working class and the fantasy of a world of “total enjoyment” without conflict, the latter is discussed here in terms of political struggle that takes on not only the form of a means to an end but also that of an end in itself.