SOURCE: "On 'Feminine' and 'Masculine' Forms of Despair," in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, edited by Robert L. Perkins, Mercer University Press, 1987, pp. 121-34.

In the following essay, Walsh reviews the two types of conscious despair as discussed by Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) in The Sickness unto Death. Walsh analyzes Kierkegaard's views on feminine despair ("despair in weakness ") and masculine despair ("despair in defiance"), and the relation of such despair to selfhood and to God.

Of the two forms of conscious despair, despair in weakness (not willing to be oneself) and despair in defiance (willing to be the self one wishes to be rather than the self one essentially is), the first is characterized by Kierkegaard as "feminine" despair, the second as "masculine" despair (SUD, 49). This distinction between the forms of despair in terms of sexual categories figures importantly in Kierkegaard's analysis of selfhood and...