Nowhere in his work is there any trace of what Lacan called the “narcissism of the lost cause”, displayed by those who cannot wait for the revolution to fail so that they might admire and bemoan it. This is what made Lenin the politician of the th century - the century of the passion of the real. As Alain Badiou has said, whereas the th century was characterised by utopian or ‘scientific’ projects and ideals which were to be fulfilled in the future, the th aimed at delivering the thing itself, at realising the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the th century was the direct experience of the real as distinct from everyday social reality - the real, in its extreme violence, is the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. Recalling the trenches of the first world war, Ernst Jünger celebrated face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, whether in the form of an encounter with the Lacanian real - the thing Antigone confronts when she violates the order of the city - or of Bataillean excess. In the domain of sexuality, the icon of this passion of the real is Oshima’s Ai No Corrida, in which the couple’s love is radicalised into mutual torture and eventually death - a clear echo of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Another

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