FROM THE CULT OF HISTORIE TO HISTORICIDE: A CRITIQUE OF COLONIALITY WITH NIETZSCHE, CASTORIADIS, AND KROPOTKIN

uma crítica à colonialidade com Nietzsche, Castoriadis e Kropotkin

Abstract

In this article, we revisit Friedrich Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation (1874) to examine the nexus between history, education, and life. Our aim is to update Nietzsche’s critique of cumulative historical scholarship (Historie) when detached from life and creative production (poiesis), and to show how this model continues to shape contemporary schooling and academic training. Methodologically, we develop a theoretical and conceptual analysis that combines an immanent reading of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of historicism and of the scholar’s formation with a dialogue with Cornelius Castoriadis (heteronomy and the bureaucratic imaginary) and Piotr Kropotkin (mutual aid), in order to interpret the political function of modern educational institutions. We also mobilize the concept of “historicide” to assess how official historical narratives and curricula can operate through systematic silencing. Our results indicate that schooling organized around productivity, specialization, and meritocratic competition tends to produce the “scholar” as an impersonal worker of knowledge, socialized into obedience to norms and reverence for institutions. In this sense, academic formation may operate as a mechanism of statolatry and voluntary servitude, reinforcing heteronomy. Within historical education, the supremacy of Historie and the rhetoric of value-neutrality reduce history to a cold inventory of facts and weaken its formative power for present action and for the cultivation of autonomy. In colonial settings, we argue that this configuration supports what we call historicide: the systematic decision to disregard Afro-Pindoramic struggles and memories in official narratives. We conclude that an education “in the service of life” requires reorienting historical learning toward creation and autonomy, replacing competitive academic logics with mutual-aid practices and actively confronting historicide. As a normative and pedagogical horizon, we outline a quilombo-inspired pedagogy in which quilombos are approached as living territories of resistance that safeguard ancestral knowledge, cultivate solidarity, and enable collective self-institution and the reinvention of life.