In most neo-materialist and neo-realist manifestos, one formulation in particular is highlighted as the antipode of what this heterogeneous movements purports to combat, namely the idea that there are “no facts, but only interpretations”. The quotation is from Nietzsche’s Nachlass. But Nietzsche is not only the critic of those who naively believe that they have left all prejudices behind, and can now access reality in an unmediated way. Nietzsche is also the relentless critic of an idealism that builds conceptual castles to preserve itself from the force of the real. Through its careful attention not just to the conceptual, but also to the affective dimensions of the realist/antirealist debate, and its underlying pathologies, his untimely criticism is more timely than ever. As exemplified in the work of Günter Figal and Maurizio Ferraris, Neo-materialism/realism is partly a symptom of a legitimate frustration from within Neo-Nietzschean post-modern thinking, with its moral and political relativism and its nihilistic metaphysics. But instead of responding to these challenges with a reductive and superficial reading of Nietzsche, there is more to be learned from his sophisticated philosophical critique.