The work of art stands its ground amid a world to which it cannot assimilate. The act of creatio is not so much a heroic act as one of embarrassment. “Go with art into your very own narrowness. And set yourself free”: the sentence from Paul Celan’s Meridian speech articulates this, if we may say so, encouraging embarrassment. It is indispensable that we tie the work of art to the category of courage; but the courage whose manifestation is the work is not the courage of a subject that remains within the field of its possibilities. This subject would already be discouraged, for it knows nothing but possibilities, nothing but options, nothing but realities, nothing but freedoms that are none. The freedom of setting-oneself-free of which Celan speaks is a different one. It is the freedom of a subject that does not know absolute freedom; freedom in the objective unfreedom of freedoms on offer and sold, by the power of fact, as alternatives. To go into one’s very own narrowness means to resist these alternatives, to seek out the utmost recess of one’s possibilities, the edge of the zone of fact; and to see here, touching upon the wall of the impossible, nothing more than this wall, this narrowness. Only here, in the experience of this blindness and narrowness, can something like a setting-oneself-free take place, in a transcendence of optional freedoms toward the freedom of the blind assertion of form. The assertion of form that is the work of art is an expression of affirmative resistance. It is affirmative to the extent that it acknowledges the limitations of the world of fact, including its imperatives of freedom; but it refuses to sacrifice to this acknowledgment the freedom of an assertion of form that remains an act of embarrassment. The world as it is cannot but daunt and embarrass. It reduces its subjects to operators in an already decided space of fact. Yet this reduction, which is unacceptable to any subject that asserts and maintains its subjecthood, generates energies of resistance, of embarrassment and aporia. We might describe the aporia within the established paths, the embarrassment in which the subject experiences the limitations of the real, as a critical element. Inherent to it, at least, is the possibility of stepping outside the field of reductive facts. As soon as there is embarrassment, there is something like dissatisfaction with the organization of the real, with the picture the world forms of itself. The subject of art is embarrassed also because this picture itself lacks all embarrassment, because it denies the possibility of being embarrassed, believing in itself as though in a matter of fact. What becomes apparent in embarrassment is the difference between fact and truth in all its irreconcilability. Facts are nothing but facts, while truths remain stopgaps born of embarrassment, born of the subject’s unwillingness to come to an arrangement with the facts. Here lies the resistance of the work of art: in its refusal to sacrifice to the powers of fact its embarrassment over their faith in themselves.