The Lacanian notion of the Real seems a priori to constitute a point of rupture between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. We search in vain for the traumatic anxiety where the subject drowns in the grips of the Real in the pages where Merleau-Ponty develops his philosophy of the flesh. Yet, he insightfully explains the absence of a boundary between the self and the other. This non-alterity of the other enters into a deep resonance with the confusion of the self and the other in the experience of the Real. This article focuses on this paradox and attempts to unfold it in order to show what the ontology of the flesh can illuminate in the experience of the Real.
