This thesis describes and analyses the intellectual trajectory of the Franco-Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard between 1970 and 2015. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this investigation not only analyses Richard's series of theoretical, political, and essayistic experimentations, it also explores Chile’s artistic production (particularly in the visual arts) and political-cultural processes over the past 45 years. In this sense, it is an examination, on the one hand, of how her critical work and thought emerged in a social context characterized by historical breaks and transformations and, on the other, of how these biographical experiences and critical-theoretical experiments derived from a specific intellectual practice that has marked her professional profile: crítica cultural. The first chapter proposes an exploration of Nelly Richard’s arrival in Chile as well as of her first critical texts on the artistic production of the 1970s. The second chapter analyses the process of institutionalization of Nelly Richard’s critical art writing during the 1980s, as well as her analytical turn towards new areas of critical thinking (such as Kristeva’s theory of signification, post-modern theory and feminism). Chapter 3 deals with Chile’s democratic transition between 1990 and 2000, as well as an in-depth analysis of the specific methodological, conceptual, and political aspects of Richard’s crítica cultural. The fourth chapter explores the way Richard has discussed and developed the question of memory in Chile from 2000 to the present. This thesis concludes that the challenge of Richard’s crítica cultural is to insist upon the search for cultural texts that are not only resistant to the culturally homogenizing policies of global capitalism and their impact on the local cultural landscape, but which also unveil and de-centre strategies of symbolic legitimization that institutionalize domination in all its forms. In this light, crítica cultural is a process of permanent refoundation.