Remembering the impossible possibility: Kierkegaard and human capital

Abstract

Kierkegaard is classified as an existentialist. The irony of course is if he were authentically existential, then he would escape any categorisation. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as yet one more item on the shelves of the history of philosophy, why not read him as though he were relevant to our lives? Our argument is that modern capitalism has taken a subjective turn, and therefore reading Kierkegaard is as timely as ever. This isn’t a matter of constructing a politics out his texts but applying it to our lives. The modern subjective form of capital is human capital as was already diagnosed by Foucault in his prophetic lectures on bio-politics. At the heart of human capital is the ideology of the subject as a form of investment. We want to show how Kierkegaard’s own account of subjectivity resists this appropriation of the self by capital through a new ontology of subjectivity. At the heart of this ontology is a reversal of Aristotle. It is not the actual that determines the possible, but the possible the actual.