Despair (Kierkegaard)

In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard defines despair as the fundamental disorder of selfhood — not an emotion but a structural condition in which the self has failed to relate properly to its own existence. Because the self is constituted through the ongoing activity of relating to itself, despair is the breakdown of that activity. Kierkegaard identifies two primary forms: the despair of weakness, in which the person refuses to be the particular, limited self her circumstances have produced, and the despair of defiance, in which she attempts to create herself from nothing, denying the conditions she did not choose. Most unsettling is his claim that despair is often invisible — a person can be productive, successful, admired, and utterly despairing because genuine selfhood has been abandoned for a performance.