This paper studies the writings of Jean Baudrillard, François Laruelle and Clément Rosset around the notion of the real: The purpose is to sketch the philosophical context in which they have tried in the last thirty or forty years to testify to a real, to what the real may be or may have been. Despite their differences, they write as if the real were t be, should be or ought to be what is preserved, and moreover preserved as the term of truth in an opposition with the imaginary, illusion or the simulacrum which remains suspected.