ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at examples of what are variously called animal, commodity or little big histories. Neanderthal histories like Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ Kindred, as well as a broader group of non-human histories, intimate at something more than the need for advocacy or care, or for ethics by extension for non-human entities. Donna Haraway and Karen Barad look to the scientific idea of diffraction to posit an idea of ethics in which entities are mutually entailed and inseparable. Margulis promotes symbiogenesis as playing a key role in evolutionary jumps, including the emergence of humans. It is possible to write a history of ‘response-ability’ that focuses on the intersecting ripples cast by the interactions of entities, at all kinds of spatio-temporal scales. The distinctiveness of the Holocaust and human histories seems to turn on their conceptual nature and the implications that has for ethics.
