The “affirmative essence” (Thodor W. Adorno) of art must turn against its own distorted image, against the idealist temptation to locate art somewhere beyond the world of fact. Affirmation is not naïveté or approbation. Affirmation is invention and construction. The affirmative intensity of the work of art includes a double gesture that encompasses the acknowledgment of its historicity as much as the courage to forgo self-satisfied self-enclosure in a critical-reflective assurance of its status as a resultant, a double gesture that demands an opening toward the inconsistency in the fabric of determiners. Facts are nothing but facts, states of affairs only states of affairs: art knows that knowledge is not everything, that the artist’s responsibility begins with building affirmative resistance to all vulgar materialisms and positivisms while also suspending all idealisms that promise to it the existence of a reality beyond this, the only one; for that way lies its total dehistoricization. Realism or idealism: the alternative is deceptive—in the history of philosophy, in philosophical aesthetics, in art.