ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses by seeing what we can learn from some very queer creatures, including one creature whose lack of an evident visualising apparatus shifts the focus from essential differences to diffraction patterns and differences-in-the-making. For all we have learned from our intra-actions with brittlestars the issue is not whether or not we are willing to follow Nature's example. The biomimetic-inspired study of the brittlestar reveals the limitations of the geometrical optics of mirroring and shows us that the crucial point is not mirroring but its creative undoing, not sameness for its own sake but attentiveness to differences that matter. The ethical questions that we will want to consider are not only about how nonhuman animals are being appropriated for human desires but also how our desires and our beings are co-constitutively reconfigured as well. Reflexive analyses don't cut it; we need to understand diffraction effects: how differences are constituted and enfolded, and which differences matter.
