ABSTRACT
The black novelist Richard Wright (born in Mississippi in 1908) boasted that he knew everything that Kierkegaard had written before he came to read his books. However, as Paul Gilroy has pointed out, 'Wright's apparently intuitive foreknowledge of the issues raised by Kierkegaard was not intuitive at al l ' , but was a part of the experience of an American black man in the 1930s (Gilroy, 1993, p. 159).1 For those living with the status of almost-persons in a society that thinks the human in terms of the autonomous (white) male subject, it is Kierkegaard who captures the internal divisions and conflicting demands of the subject of modernity - and not Adorno, who was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard, but who also neutralizes Kierkegaard, so that he becomes just another idealist who is also a theorist of 'bourgeois' thought.
