Contrary to what is said, there is no truth about the real, given that the real is outlined as excluding meaning. It would nonetheless be too much to say that there is the real, because to say this is to suppose a meaning. The term real itself has a meaning, and I myself have played at one time with evoking the echo of the word reus, which in Latin means culpable – one is more or less culpable of the real. This is why psychoanalysis is something serious, and it is not absurd to say that it could slip into becoming a swindle. (Jacques Lacan)

” A—–! And what is that?”

” A —- is what Proclus, in a little note to his third book on the theology of Plato, defines as —- —–”

The Confidence-Man. His Masquerade (1923) — London, Bombay and Sydney 1923, p. 256.