The Sickness Unto Death

First published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Soren Kierkegaards The Sickness unto Death endures as a seminal text in the history of theology and moral philosophy, and an essential companion to his earlier works. Beginning with the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus miraculously raised from the dead, Kierkegaard here presents his explication of despair as the sickness unto death, that is, a sickness not of the body, but of the spirit, and thus, of the self. A dramatic medical history of the course of this sickness, The Sickness unto Death culminates, as all medical histories do, in a crisis, a turning point at which the self, the patient, either realises or abandons itself. Masterfully translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, with his historians eye and craftsmans feel for the challenges of Kierkegaards syntax (Vanessa Parks Rumble), this trenchant, explosive inquiry into the human soul spares no one, not even its author.