27
Animality
Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 27

Every Nervous System

on more-than-human neurodiversity, and the animality we reclaim

L★S
Love You Down
To Your Star Stuff
· open edition ·
The variety of minds

No two
alike

Nervous systems are roughly 550 million years old, and life has been improvising them ever since — into shapes almost nothing like ours. An octopus keeps most of its neurons in its arms, so each arm half-thinks for itself. A jellyfish has no brain and no centre at all — just a net of nerves ringing its body. A nematode worm runs an entire life on exactly 302 neurons, every connection mapped.

No two of these are the same — and no two within a kind are, either. Every nervous system is a one-off, tuned by body and history and the particular world it grew up sensing.

So read neurodiversity at face value and it can't mean only us. It means the whole living spread of ways to have a nervous system. There is no standard nervous system, any more than there is a standard mind.

There is no standard nervous system — not across species, and not within one.
four ways to have a nervous system octopus jellyfish · no centre worm · 302 neurons you read the captions to tell them apart

octopus · jellyfish · worm · you
every one a one-off

Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 2
the circle keeps opening neuro- diversity ethodiversity · every animal it was never closed at the human

neurodiversity, nested in ethodiversity
no valid reason to stop

The more-than-human turn

No reason to stop
at the human

The philosopher Ombre Tarragnat puts the challenge plainly: there is "no valid reason to be anthropocentric… when you talk about neurodiversity." If difference is the rule of every nervous system, then the belonging claim was always more-than-human.

Their word for it is ethodiversity — the variety of ways of being and behaving across all animals — and it takes "behaviour" back from the behaviourists. Not "soulless mechanisms triggered by physicochemical reactions," Tarragnat writes, but "a subjective response to a bodymind's particular situation in the world."

Ethodiversity and ethodivergence, they argue, are "fundamentally animal phenomena." Nervous systems don't stop at the edge of our species — and neither does neurodivergence. We seated the council for exactly this reason.

"Ethodiversity and ethodivergence are fundamentally animal phenomena."— Ombre Tarragnat
Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 3
The grid over behaviour

The rule that
says behave

If ethodiversity is the field, ethonormativity is the grid laid over it: the unwritten, humanist rule about which behaviours are allowed and expected in a given animal — human or not — in a given room.

And the grid has teeth. The horse who refuses the rider; the frightened or depressed cat who resists being petted and lashes out — for departing from the script, Tarragnat notes, animals like these "are often abandoned or euthanised." Ethonormative violence is real, and often fatal. It is the same move, scaled across species, that pathologises a stimming child or a nonspeaking adult.

The reframe is the one this whole collection keeps making. The behaviour read from outside as a malfunction is, from inside, a subjective response that makes sense. Change the room, not the creature.

Behaviour is a subjective response to a situation — not a malfunction to correct.
the grid over the field ethonormativity "misbehaviour" — punished the field came before the grid

ethonormativity: the grid · ethodiversity: the field
the cost of departing the script

Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 4
two ways to name the animal bestialise "rational human" "machine-animal" a wall · abjection (hum)animalise kin · reclaimed one norm divides · the other reclaims

bestialisation vs (hum)animalisation
the problem was never being animal

Bestialisation & its refusal

Reclaiming
animality

Here is the trap Tarragnat names. Neurodivergent people are so often pathologised precisely by being animalised — cast as less-than-human, machine-like, without an inner life. Tarragnat calls the cruel version bestialisation: an apparatus of power working "at the intersection of speciesism and neuronormativity," splitting the world into the "intelligent, sensible human" and the "non-rational, machine-like animal." Judith Butler (2020) names it too — the subjugation of animality by "a specific humanist norm."

But there is another move. To (hum)animalise oneself — to claim, without shame, that we are animals — "can be an act of subversion, a way of reclaiming animality." The problem was never being animal. The problem was a norm that made animality abject.

So we take it back: not "you're like an animal" as insult, but humanimal as kin. Neurodivergence and animality are co-constructed — free one and you free the other.

"I would rather be a divergent animal than a typical human."— Ombre Tarragnat
Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 5
A posthumanist ethos

Distance is not
disconnection

The oldest slander against autistic people is that we are disconnected — sealed off, missing the world. Tarragnat's posthumanism turns it over. Autistic embodiment is not a broken bond; it is humanimal and relational, woven through worlds, climates, and multispecies relations.

And relation does not always look like closeness. Sometimes the most relational thing a body can do is step back. Tarragnat calls for an ethos "where keeping a distance or shutting down is sometimes the best way to preserve relationality." The cat who leaves the lap; the person who goes quiet and still — not abandoning the bond, but protecting it. Withdrawal can be care.

Every animal knows this. Distance is part of how the living stay in relation — and every knowing is from a body, somewhere (Haraway's situated knowledges), never a view from nowhere.

Notanthropocentric — neurodiversity was never only about humans.
Notbestialisation — reclaiming animality refuses the "less-than-human" move, it doesn't repeat it.
Notfetishising — kinship, not a costume or a cage.
Not"autism = disconnection" — distance and shutdown can be how we keep relation.
Nota metaphor — the kinship is literal; we are animals.
stepping back to keep the bond quiet · still · safe the bond holds across the distance

withdrawal as care
relation, not abandonment

Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 6
a neuron, a constellation star-forged · firing · unrepeatable

sodium, potassium, calcium, carbon
all forged in stars

Star stuff, sensing

The cosmos in every
nervous system

Follow any nervous system down to its atoms and you arrive at the stars. The sodium and potassium firing across a neuron, the calcium, the carbon of every nerve — all forged in stars, in every animal alike. Each nervous system is the universe wired up to feel itself, in a way that has never existed before and never will again.

There have been billions of them, and no two the same: octopus and owl, whale and wasp, you and the cat who won't be petted. Difference isn't the exception in the animal kingdom. It is the animal kingdom.

So the belonging claim opens all the way out. The universe doesn't pathologise its own variation — in any species. We are divergent animals, made of star stuff, and we would rather be exactly that. Love you down to your star stuff — every nervous system of it.

Each nervous system is the universe wired up to feel itself — no two ever the same.
Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 7
L★S Read neurodiversity literally and it never stopped at the human. Every nervous system is different — octopus, owl, and us — and the animality we were shamed with is ours to reclaim. We would rather be divergent animals than typical anything.
No. 7 You Were Never One Thing — endosymbiosis & the cell as a collective
No. 8 The Universe Runs on Difference — variety, monoculture & ethodiversity
No. 14 The Council of All Beings — multispecies justice & more-than-human kin
No. 15 Every Creature's Own Sky — umwelt, attention-worlds & double empathy
No. 26 A Mycelium and a Rhizome — decentralised knowledge & the Autistic Rhizome
No. 27 Every Nervous System — more-than-human neurodiversity & reclaiming animality ← you are here
Reflection

Where have you been animalised in order to be dismissed — and what would it mean to reclaim that animality on your own terms?

Whose ethodivergence around you (a pet, a wild creature, a person) gets punished as "misbehaviour"?

When has stepping back or shutting down been the most caring, most relational thing you could do?

Every Nervous System is the twenty-seventh zine in the Stimpunks series. It extends the belonging claim past our own species, following Ombre Tarragnat's more-than-human turn.

The philosophy is Tarragnat's, drawn from their published essays — What is ethodiversity? (2025) and What is bestialisation? (2026), From the Autistic Umwelt to Autistic Worldings (2025), and an interview with Antropología de la Vida Animal — and from the stated position of their doctoral thesis, Autism and Animality: An Antispeciesist–Posthumanist Philosophy of Neurodiversity (Université Paris 8, UR LEGS), which was not yet public at the time of writing; thesis-level claims here follow its announced argument rather than a published text. Judith Butler's account of bestialisation is from their 2020 work; ethodiversity was coined in ecology by Adolfo Cordero-Rivera; situated knowledges are Donna Haraway's; philosophical ethology draws on Vinciane Despret and Jakob von Uexküll (see Every Creature's Own Sky, No. 15). The science: nervous systems arose in the Ediacaran–Cambrian, roughly 550+ million years ago, and diversified enormously — the octopus's distributed nervous system (Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds), the centreless nerve nets of cnidarians, and the fully mapped 302-neuron connectome of C. elegans (White et al., 1986). The star-forged elements are Carl Sagan's star stuff.

The reading — that neurodiversity was always more-than-human, and that reclaiming animality is liberation for every nervous system — is Tarragnat's, and ours. You were a divergent animal, made of star stuff, all along.

Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 27 · Open Edition
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stimpunks.org · starstuff.earth
Every Nervous System · Stimpunks 8