it would not appear to be the last thing" . As, he connotes in the strictest sense, the last things being death itself, but death only the last thing, which makes despair precisely the final thing for man.
Hence, despair becomes the sickness unto death. Kierkegaard notes this in bodily sickness, but far from being true, death only succumbs to the end of the body, meaning to say to die from a bodily death. On the contrary, despair is a sickness wherein there is no bodily death but eternal death, since the torment of despair is not being able to die. As such, the sickness unto death becomes an expression of not dying. It is like a terminal sickness where the only hope to get rid of it is to die, and while in despair, gets rid of the only cure, of not being able to die, hence suffering entirely bodily torment. There is no hope of cure, the hopelessness of not being to derived the pleasure ofdying is like death being dead itself. The danger of which says Kierkegaard, despair clings to you even more terrible than that of bodily death. For Kierkegaard, dying means that it is all over, but dying the death means to live to experience death; and if for a single instant this experience is possible, it is tantamount to experiencing it forever. Despair becomes an eternal sickness that the self loses its capability of dying in the same sense that the body dies of sickness. An impossibility,.
wherein what happens is that the dying of despair transforms itself constantly into living thing. It is precisely self-consuming, that you cannot do anything else but to despair itself go deeper and deeper into impotent self-consumation. The fact that despairing cannot consume the body is and reason why the self-gnawing pain is eternal since the comfort of ridding oneself of despair cannot be attained. In contrast, a despairing man can only despair about himself. He hopes to achieve end of his despair but is powerless to do so since his own anxiety over the despair that consumes him.
