ABSTRACT
Harvie Ferguson’s attempt to use Kierkegaard to construct a sociology of modernity was published by Routledge in 1995. According to Ferguson, melancholy is the only dimension of “depth” that remains given in modernity. It is the only subject position available within the modern world from which one can begin to transcend the condition of modernity, even though, as people shall see, it is a position one must eventually leave behind. Ferguson identifies this melancholic inwardness with “inclosing reserve,” suggesting that melancholy’s essential incommunicability necessitates Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms. Melancholy is typically thought of as a condition affecting the individual psyche, so part of the burden of Ferguson’s project is to show that, because Kierkegaard’s category of the “individual” is a “social category” that is irreducible to a role supporting an ideology of individualism, Kierkegaard’s religious psychology should not be understood as a theory of subjectivity in a narrowly defined sense, but of the individual construed as a “social relation.”.
