In continental philosophy, the Real refers to reality in its unmediated form. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is an "impossible" category because of its inconceivability and opposition to expression.

The Real is the intelligible form of the horizon of truth of the field-of-objects that has been disclosed. As the Real Order of the Borromean knot in Lacanianism, it is opposed in the unconscious to the Imaginary, which encompasses fantasy, dreams and hallucinations. In depth psychology, the Real can be described as a "negative space", analogous to a "black hole", a philosophical void of sociality and subjectivity, a traumatic consensus of intersubjectivity, or as an absolute noumenalness between signifiers. Lewis states that the Real can be a presence or is a substance and cites Derrida's claim that the real is authenticity.

Complete understanding, as in [,on the one hand,] the resolution after the period of mourning, represents [,on the other hand,] clear arrival at the Spinozan “impossible”.

— Ian S. Miller

Even the word 'trace' is an appropriation of the real. [...] ' Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist [Derrida’s italics]. [...] (OG: 167, my italics)'[.]

— Michael Lewis

Jacques Lacan defines the Real as a plenum, a nature beyond culture that is contradistinct from the ontic. The Lacanian real is a section of the triadic, Borromean knot: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real; the center of the knot is the sinthome (monad-soul).

Felluga states that Bill Brown's Thing is conceptually close to the Real, as it is a type of unreliableness of the relation between subject and object that is neither subject nor object.