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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 121
structurally theological appeal to the Omniscients. This concept both resembles and challenges the Jaina concepts of omniscience and cyclical time, while remaining un-theological in structure and function. Here I hope to begin inserting anekāntavāda in between the singular perspective of the irreducible jiva and the omniscience, while also placing pragmatic but incomplete and non-limiting guides in the role the closed omniscient now serves.
Finally, after making possible the privileging the singular jīva over both blind men and Omniscients, I will close with the ethical analysis of Gayatri Spivak. Spivak takes all of our synthesis and completes the picture by instrumentalizing anekāntavāda-the multi-faceted nature of any jīva or singularity. Her work affirms the Jain definition of non-violence as compassion without attachment, ego and self. She also shares with Jainism a kind of radical assertion of Other's agency and assumes each jīva knows what is best for their life. However, if Spivak advocates letting go of the ego for the sake of the Other--priviledging what the other or jīva might want and believe, never colonizing them by assuming we know the best--the Jaina's interest in their own karmic path leads them to gable in the direction of the scriptures, rather than in the direction of the Other. So I propose we read Spivak and Jainism as advocating a kind of ahiṁsā adventure, one that will have us gambling our beliefs and our own karmic burden, in each and every moment, on the compassion of inhabiting the suffering or perspective of an Other. It is only in this ahiṁsā adventure, this gamble of non-violence, that Jainism can begin to move into fuller appreciation for the complexity of inter-relations.
Before beginning, I want to affirm that my interest in Jainism is born of my respect not only for its contributions to philosophy but even more so, for the care and protection it has offered the billions of bodies who would have been sacrificed, eaten, stepped on, abused, neglected or otherwise subjugated without its influence. And yet, unlike Jainism, which is nevertheless unapologetic in its solipsism and its privileging of the liberation of the 'human' self out of this world, I am primarily and with equal tenacity, attentive to the consequences of this solipsism on those who have been called 'animal'. It is only because Levinas, Derrida and Spivak represent for me the best and most ethical of poststrcucturalists (and the West as a whole) that I honor them with a place in dialogue with a tradition as richly compassionate as Jainism. And it is only because I believe hierarchy vis-a-vis omniscience will stymie our mutual goal of anekāntavāda and ahiṁsā that I offer the following criticisms of Jain thought from a place of camaraderie and a shared hope for a radically less violent future. 12 II. Levinas, Nayavāda and the Blind Men It is perhaps appropriate to begin this section by telling another story like that of the elephant and the blind men. Only this time, the creature being inspected is Emmanuel Levinas and the creature doing the seeing, the knowing, is a dog. Levinas tells this story in his short essay, 'Name of a dog': There were 70 of us in a forestry commando unity for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.... The French uniform protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or food, passed by and only sometimes raised their eyes, stripped us of our human skin. Our comings and goings, our sorrow and laughter,
