It must be possible to present reality as the historical fiction that it is. Its impact on the individual is real, is fate. But it is not fate, but made by the labour of generations of men who the whole time actually wanted and want something completely different. In this sense it is in various respects simultaneously real and unreal. Real and unreal in every one of its individual aspects: collective wishes of men, labour power, relations of production, persecution of witches, history of wars, life histories of individuals. Each of these aspects themselves and all together have an antagonistic quality: they are a crazy fiction and they have a real impact.

This makes for rigidity. Frozen coldness. Men die as a result, are pulled apart, are subjected to bombing raids, are dead while alive, are placed in asylums as mad, etc. Reality is real in that it really oppresses men. It is unreal in that every oppression only displaces energies. They disappear from sight but they continue to work underground. The repressed is the source of all labour underneath the terror of the real.

A so-called love scene is for example such a real fiction. We are all accustomed to measure such a scene in a film - or in reality - by ‘realistic criteria', which are supposedly contained in this scene itself. The love scene, however, is only realistic if for example the future abortion is also built into it. But also the history of all earlier abortions. The same applies to a love scene in reality whether or not the pair think of abortion, whether or not this is relevant for the concrete case. All previous experience, also that excluded by contraception, also that of parents and grandparents and of all other love scenes, is present in the concrete scene. The conflict between tenderness and the untender consequences, the excessive expectation and how much of it is fulfilled, precisely this is the real content. All other perceptions are measured against the sharpness of this conflict. Isolated, reduced to the ‘present', the love scene becomes ideological. The scene also becomes ideological if all the illusions are cast out. It could not take place.

The history of whole generations and of all its consequences stamps the capacity or the incapacity for love, all forms of expression in the scene, all contact, all hesitation, the spontaneity.