The International Institute for Philosophy and Social Studies (IIPSS), together with the Metales Pesados publishing house, will publish two new works from the collection Constelaciones Críticas, which was funded by the 2023 Book and Reading Public Fund from the Ministry of Cultures, Artes and Heritage.
The collection Constelaciones Críticas is an editorial project of the International Institute for Philosophy and Social Studies (IIPSS) that aims to produce theoretical tools that allow us to understand current events, interpret the past, and project the future nationally and internationally. The distinctive feature of this editorial project is the question of criticism through which the modes of production, the frameworks of interpretation, and the forms of power that are at the basis of our ways of knowing reality and living collectively are questioned.
With the award of the 2023 Book and Reading Fund by the IIPSS editorial team, the Constelaciones Críticas collection “extends the idea of criticism beyond the conceptual through two works that complicate and question cultural production: the first is the work by Ivana Peric consisting of a documented and imaginative work on the work of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini; The second is the book by Tomás Peters that presents the deployment of cultural criticism in Chile based on the work of Nelly Richard,” comments Nicolás Ried, director of the collection and researcher at the IIPSS.
In Ivana Peric’s work, “Pasolini’s Current Events. Study on the Figural Power of Cinematographic Language”, the critical word runs silently throughout the essay without being pronounced. For Ivana Peric, lawyer and doctor of philosophy, criticism in Pasolini’s work, “is not understood as a mere contradiction that seeks to distance oneself from an order: it is a permanent disposition that, in the act of separating from an idea, action or work, effectively produces an alternative that is torn from the same reality to which it tries to respond.
In “the historical scene of the residue. Cultural criticism in Chile” by Tomás Peters, the historical inscription of cultural criticism in Chile from 1970 to the present is described and analyzed: “through a documentary review of theoretical and critical work of Nelly Richard, the book draws a contextual diagram of the relationship between aesthetics, culture, and politics that emerged in Chile in the last half-century. In doing so, it seeks to reconstruct an intellectual scene that positioned critical imagination as a form of resistance and transformative desire,” maintains the author and President of the IIPSS.
These two new books, to be released in 2024, will be published by the Metales Pesados publishing house, following the path inaugurated by the works “What is criticism? Michel Foucault, reading the Present without Judgment” by Nicolás Ried (2022) and “Criticism and Materialism. Study on the beginning of the Critical Theory” of Nicolás Del Valle (2023), the institutional link between the publishing house and the International Institute for Philosophy and Social Studies (IIPSS) was strengthened.