In these two authentic forms of despair, it seems that SK is trying to establish a balance, even a synthesis, between the self and God, the temporal and the eternal, finitude and the infinitude. . In order to make sense of the human self, SK illustrates that the self has two relationships, each of which is fully capable of producing despair. The first is a relationship of self to self, the second, a relationship of self to something else (God). As with freedom and necessity, in which no freedom can exist without the possibility of need, SK reminds us that there can be no despair without the “annihilated possibility of the capacity to be there” (45). possibility to be desperate, or can one be desperate while being unconscious of this despair? In human terms, an illness “unto death” means the end of life, in Christian terms, the beginning of life (47); thus, to be sick to death is, paradoxically, to be incapable of dying, and despair is “the despair of not even being able to die” (48). If this is indeed the case, how...