Art shares with philosophy that they are both: affirmation and resistance. Affirmation does not equal approval. Affirmation means saying yes to reality in its incommensurability-value. Being open to the world as it is. That is why such affirmation implies a certain resistiveness, a resistance against a schema of reality that excludes incommensurability. The world of established commensurabilities—the homogenized space of fact—owes its consistency, which is therefore illusory, to this exclusion. If art, as Theodor W. Adorno demands, “evokes chaos,” then it does so in order to let the consistency of what exists become brittle, but in such a way that it is at once aware of how much the appeal to the chaotic is already orthodox, a form of pathos and a phrase: a cliché. Clearly, internal contradiction is part of the work of art, as it affirms itself as an aporetic organization: “Every artwork is in fact an oxymoron. Its own reality is for it unreal, it is indifferent to what it essentially is, and at the same time it is its own precondition; in the context of reality it is all the more unreal and chimerical. The enemies of art have always understood this better than those of its apologists who have fruitlessly sought to deny its constitutive paradox.” The constitutive paradox is a distinguishing mark of aesthetic-artistic as much as conceptual-philosophical construction. It is a mark even of the concept of art, to the extent that it is part and parcel of the work of art to engender a concept compatible with it—as Albrecht Wellmer notes, “the question regarding the concept of art is tied in a peculiar way to art itself.” We might also say that art exists only as the philosophy of art. A philosophical aspect (and there is no philosophy utterly divorced from the concept, however insistently it articulates its irreducibility to the conceptual) is obviously inherent to art. Just as any conceptual thinking relates to what is not conceptual, to an outside outside the concept, art necessarily engenders its concept and its determinations of form in a confrontation of the formless or chaos. Its most important goal is to break open the established sociocultural patterns, always aware that “in the total society, art should introduce chaos into order rather than the reverse” (Theodor W. Adorno). The chaotic aspect of art is owed to its blindness, which, far from being a defect, is necessarily implied by the production of the new. However liable to misapprehension these categories, as the objects of affirmation, may be: blindness, chaos, and newness are indispensable terms of artistic activity. Adorno associates blindness with what Goethe said about the “precipitate of the absurd, the incommensurable, in every artistic production.” The “blindness of the sense of form” requires that it open up to “contingency.” “Aesthetic rationality must plunge blindfolded into the creative process rather than directing it externally as an act of reflection on the artwork.” The decisive point is that rationality is closely interwoven with an aspect of irrationality. Art must never exhaust itself in irrationalism, which is vulgar and always reactionary. At the same time, it must resist total rationalism (as well as naïve positivism and its religion of fact). It is part of the “drawn tension of the artwork” that it is doubly opponent, resisting both, the obscurantism of reason as well as that of unreason. There is no artistic production or thinking without a certain precipitate movement that demands the utmost precision of the subject. Precision works to foster clarity, while setting the limit of intelligibility. What is clear need not be intelligible. Complete understanding abets diffuseness and generates the obscurantism of total intelligibility. “Understanding is itself a problematic category in the face of art’s enigmatic character. […] The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level and the more obscure its constitutive enigma becomes” (Theodor W. Adorno). The specific intelligibility of the work of art corresponds to an enigmatic self-evidence. In the work and our experience of it, both aspects intersect: enigma and self-evidence. As so often, it is music that Adorno thinks of first. Music is prototypical, he writes, in being “at once completely enigmatic and totally evident.” The enigmatic dimension of the work of art withdraws it from an approach to it that relies on identification; it constitutes its specific heterogeneity and irreducibleness. In art as much as philosophy, clarity means the affirmation of the work’s withdrawal-character such that, as it opposes the illusion of transparency, it at once also resists the phantasm of intransparency, the temptation to ascribe to the work a sublime profundity through which it would be connected to higher truths. A work of art is evident by virtue of its presence, which elevates it above the ground of fact while also according to it a reality that is in strong contact with the inconsistency of the world of fact. The withdrawal-character of art refers almost immediately to the inconsistency of all realities by pointing into a sort of ontological abysmalness the experience of which can easily render the experience of art that of a certain dizziness. Everything depends on letting the dizziness that seizes the subject in the face of the unreality-value of its realities become as precise as possible, which means the same as measuring out a form compatible to formlessness or, as Adorno puts it, responding to the “overwhelming force of what is” with the force of one’s powerlessness, since the “wish to change” anything at all requires that we “make our own powerlessness an aspect of what we think and perhaps also of what we do.” Powerlessness in this sense would be simply another name for the inconsistency of the subject and its reality. An appropriation of powerlessness would imply an affirmation of this inconsistency as the condition of the possibility of subjectivity. The works of art are “enigmas, not mysteries” (T.W. Adorno), because, secular as they are, they discern their real amid reality, not outside it: the inconsistency-point of the texture of fact. Part of the persuasive power of the Aesthetic Theory is that it is neither merely affirmative nor merely critical, precisely because its affirmationism is a critical one: a critique of what is as an affirmation of its inconsistency.