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128 : śramana, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013 does not believe the living jīva is reducible to any one of its perceived predicates, even while anekāntavāda, syādvāda and nayavāda all prevent this transcendentalization of certain elements over others, Jains still find themselves subjugating the perspectives of certain creatures to those of the figure they believe is highest--the human. It is important to note, even after all of the work Jains have done to equalize jiva, the presumed absence of language and reason' is still what determines this hierarchy.
However, taking the sympathetic perspective for a moment, one could easily understand how the texts of the Omniscients are a sufficient if not necessary condition for providing some guiding principles in the midst of potentially infinite ethical perspectives. Yet it is the 'not necessary' part of this logical formulation upon which I wish to focus. Rather than letting this theory of how to act evolve out of their belief in anekāntavāda, ahiṁsā and jīva-as Levinas and Derrida do with singularity, differand and the face--Jainism brings in culturally, historically specific doctrines that actually limit not only the more radical quality of anekāntavāda I have outlined above but also those creatures who are at its doctrinal mercy. 46
So what does this organic origination of an ahimsā guided perspective look like? It might look like Derrida's concept of the 'to come', the concept of Messianism. Per the element of differand that suggests the Other might be knowable, but this is always put off into the future--it is always deferred until later--the other jīva can never be known in the here and now. Derrida derives his concept of the 'to come' Derrida calls "messianism without a messiah." For Derrida, this is an appeal to the Jewish form of Messianism (and it is perhaps notable that we are taken back, at the end, to Levinas at the Hollocaust here).
This Messianism, originally elaborated in Jewish thinkers like Levinas, appeals to a paradox of the Jewish tradition--the positing that the Messiah will come, despite the disbelief in the literal reality of that coming. Rather infamously, Jewish religion centers around right conduct intended to prepare the way for the Messiah, while they simultaneously do not believe in a literal figure that will ever appear.47 For Derrida, this parallels the relationship of between the self and the Other, between the quest for truth and the truth itself. Every time you try to stabilize the meaning of a thing, try to fix it in a position with limited and partial knowledge, the thing itself, if there is anything at all to it, slips away. 48 Is this not the very principle of nayavāda? You will always find more aspects to it than are possible to see. To put Derrida's point simplistically, it might be suggested that the meaning of a particular object, or a particular word, is never stable but always in the process of change (eg, the dissemination of meaning for which deconstruction has become notorious). The messianic therefore refers predominantly to a structure of our existence that involves waiting-waiting even in activity--and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon that possible future. This makes possible a messanism that has stripped away the necessity of faith and shed its theological underpinning and that this in fact presents a more thorough notion of a temporality capable of confronting the future. In other words, Derrida is not referring to a future that will one day become present (or a particular conception of the
