A Whole, A Fragment

A Whole, A Fragment presents a highly personal, experimental work by a great American social theorist, Kurt H. Wolff. In this extended prose poem - a text that reads as much as a work of art as important scholarship - Wolff has created a work of phenomenology that goes far beyond the typical methods of empirical social science to embrace field work as an extraordinary openness to being. Wolff employs a radical hermeneutical method in exploring his own humanity, taking key experiences, dreams and ideas, and continually revisiting them from different perspectives throughout the text in order to describe the self-construction of his life. Including personal letters to Wolff from Hannah Arendt and Hermann Bloch, the book portrays a fertile mind’s reckoning with pre-phenomenal being in a way that dances between the realms of the intellectual consideration and the surrender of will to the intoxication of lived experience.