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This paper accounts for “music” as a site for soundings of the human, and for setting out terms for “kindness” in a period of rampant European colonial expansion. It has been said of musical knowledge “after 1800” that it was vital to stylizations of man-animal relations, spirit possession states, geopolitical orders, legal property regimes, ideas about reason and aesthetics, autonomy and freedom, racial and sexual typologies, and that it set the store for organism-plus-climate thinking, and environmentality writ large. In counterpoint, acoustic knowledge also became mixed up in liberal histories of sympathetic resonance, good listening, humanitarian intervention, and kindness. 

 

If the paper has a provocation, it is to pull out a disanthropic strand in the last 223 years of European musical thought devoted, not to the milquetoast liberalism underscoring what Walter Mignolo calls pluriversal humanity, but to what Foucault, in the conference abstract, calls the erasure of man. The will to human erasure is in fact a topos common to accounts of much European romantic-modern music, emancipation from the massa damnata being the aspiration of our best avant-garde creatives, disruptors, and deregulators. I want to historicize the idea, formed in the ethical claim that to be kind to the planet, life, animals or environments, that a line should be drawn under humanity. My topic, in other words, is human sacrifice – the conviction that, for the greater good, humans must go. 

 

Are kind beings really being kind when they are being kind “beyond the human”?