Forty Years of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory – The History of a Counter-Institution
Tuesday, March 8th, 18:00, the Cultural Center of Belgrade (Kolarčeva 6)
On Tuesday, March 8th, in the foyer of the cinema of the Cultural Center Belgrade, an exhibition about the first forty years of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory will be officially opened.
This exhibition is the central event of the celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the Institute, and it will be an important retrospective of the social, intellectual, political and cultural events in Yugoslavia and Serbia in the last half century. The establishment of the Institute is related to the founding of the Center for Philosophy and Social Theory at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade in 1981 as well as to the fate of a group of professors who were removed from classes at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1975. Their openness to re-examining social reality, constant criticism and the demand to live the “creative praxis” collided with the authoritarian character of the political order. Over the course of the following decades, the Institute had become a place where intellectuals were free to research, write and confront their views about social reality. All of them were bound by the belief that without engagement there could be no critical intellectual, and they saw social criticism as a precondition for creative humanists. Constantly resisting the dominant social and political matrices, the Institute built not only itself but also the society, and became an engaged and consistent – counter-institution.
Who were the university professors who were the first opposition to Tito’s regime and whom he labeled as enemies of the state and foreign agents? How did scientists spend their vacations in prison? What did the institution where the leaders of the largest, yet different, opposition parties in Serbia worked in the early 1990s look like? The answers to these questions will be provided by the unique exhibition “40 Years – The History of a Counter-Institution”
The exhibition will be open until March 31st, 2022.
After the opening ceremony, which will feature Dragoljub Mićunović, one of the eight founders of the Institute, there will be a panel discussion on the development of intellectuals and the scope of intellectual engagement in today’s societies on the cinema stage under the title: “From Praxis to the Practice of Engagement: Can Intellectuals Change Society?” The participants of the panel are: Vladan Đokić, Rector of the University of Belgrade, Snježana Prijić Samaržija, Rector of the University of Rijeka, Ivan Vejvoda, President of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, and Rajko Grlić, director and professor at the University of Houston.