Located at the junction of the paths of the university, non-academic culture and psychoanalysis, 17, Institute of Critical Studies is a writing space: field of construction and deconstruction of notions, forms and horizons. 17 intervenes in problems unattended by other instances: it promotes research, teaching and dissemination of critical studies. Likewise, the Institute promotes cultural interventions, provides consulting services. It brings together all its facets in the publications it publishes: www.diecisiete.org

Why 17?
The proper name of the Institute, figure 17, recalls the reciprocal call of cultural criticism and psychoanalysis that took place within the framework of the Frankfurt School before the German hecatomb of the 1930s. It was social researchers who attracted by First time in their city a small group of psychoanalysts and made a place in their building. The result of their exchanges was an important legacy against totalitarianism. The space they cohabited carried by number on 17. Destroyed by war, only the letters to which he gave and still give place remain.

Critical studies
As a result of the contributions of these three masters of suspicion, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, as well as their contemporary intellectual legatarios, critical studies deal with social and cultural life. They are distinguished by their commitment to the events of their time, as well as by their inter-, trans- or postdisciplinary nature and their orientation in relation to three main motives: subjectivity, language and hegemony. They not only concern themselves in innovative ways with inherited knowledge objects, they also raise the critical inventory of traditional knowledge or practices and settle new questions.

Areas
Recently, we completed the following institutional CV to account for our activities since 2001. The document was prepared at the request of the Ecuadorian educational authority, from which the emphasis in this presentation of our links with Ecuador.

Over the last few years we have established a growing number of work areas, whose expressions include postgraduate, academic extension, consulting and the Institute's editorial production. Said areas are: Arts, scene and aesthetic thought; Communication; Straight; Human rights; "Disability"; Ecology, technology and society; Economy; Studies in health and medicine; Territorial studies; Philosophy; Gender; Cultural Management; Management and organizational thinking; History and historiography; Critical childhoods; Literature; Methodology; Pedagogy; Political thinking; Psychoanalysis; Ateology; Critical theory

The contents cultivated by the Institute are grouped in Areas, and the strategies in Divisions. The Divisions carry the materials in charge of the Areas in the following ways:

Research: Innovation and promotion of new epistemic developments.
Academic: University interface, through degrees and formal programs, with official recognition. It focuses on the expansion of issues and problems legitimately approached in academic terms.
Extension: Non-formal, partially de-institutionalized experiences of learning and transmission of knowledge. Due to its mobility and tactical flexibility, it promotes introductory, refresher and training programs, as well as controversial and rupture proposals, associated with the thematic axes of the Institute and its different Areas.
Editorial: Publication, in various formats and materialities, of the contents selected by the Institute through its own activities and also from its relations with other entities.
Consulting: Concrete implementation of knowledge and critical initiatives in society.