________________
Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 125
corollary for the infinite attributes of any subject and the ability to use the infinity of attributes to replace the Jaina scriptural privileging of the Omniscients." Keeping with our theme of story telling, I'll begin here where Derrida begins in his famous work, The Animal That Therefore I Am: by recalling the time Derrida found himself standing naked before the gaze of a cat. Just after stepping out of the shower one afternoon, Derrida was surprised to find his cat looking at him.34 He was not as surprised to find the cat looking at him as he was to realize the cat was looking at him before he realized it and looked at her. He recounts that while cats have been assigned various roles in mythologies, religions, poetry, fiction, etc. for thousands of years, it wasn't until he found himself taken in by the gaze of this particular cat that he realized he was also an object of her gaze, in her mythology. He was the object to her subject; the elephant to her blind man. Derrida claims this encounter more clearly represented to him the relationship between the self and the other than any previous: “If I say it is a real cat that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds to its name, it doesn't do so as the exemplar of a species called cat, even less so of an animal genus or kingdom...it comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place....Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (AIA Intro).
In this important text, Derrida highlights the unsubstitutable singularity of each life by routing animality through the deconstructive logic of differance and replacing transcendental categories of human and animal with the infinite differences of bodies. The concept of differand plays a central role in Derrida's logic and is a metaphysical, epistemological and ethical claim for him. It produces his concept of singularity--similar to that of the jīva but also parallels the Jain concept of anekāntavāda and it is this latter aspect upon which I would like to dwell here. Derrida situates his theorization of otherness, signification, identity in the double meaning--the play--in the verb 'to differ.'35 This exchange is not merely between before and after, cause and effect, the primordial and derived. It signifies non-identity.36 Differance is both a process of differentiation-a process of making distinct in space--and a means of temporalizing, that is to say 'putting off until later the possible that is presently impossible.37 To differ or to be different than implies that every body, act, event, thought is not only different from every other but also different from itself--changing from moment to moment but possessed of infinite, often contradictory traits. The second component--to defer--means we are always putting off our assumption that we have fully understood irreducible bodies or thoughts. I am always chasing after a meaning I can never capture. As soon as I think I've caught it, it evades me again.
The 'play' between these two and between the qualities of presence and absence is the logic of differand. Yet this differand is not a calculation, a summation of relations,'epochs or causes, but a strategic positioning that functions to mark, from within, the openness of presence. 38 Differance goes beyond truth, where it avoids being rendered part of the zone of either non-- knowing or knowing--it is, rather, the condition for knowing. It is as though differand is not a
