Rough Cuts

Vladimir Jankélévitch allows us to rethink the relation between negation and refusal as a rift where one is confronted by the repetition of givenness and where refusal upends negation by turning the object being refused into an ineffable question. Here we turn to Freud as a reader of Jankélévitch’s refusal of German culture in order to consider his procedure of radical exclusion as a matter of idealistic temperament marking a transition from knowledge as “knowing how things are” to a different proposition which cultivates knowing “how things should be.”