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130 : Śramaņa, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
does not need a theological responsibility to the Omniscients in order to choose the correct, least violent perspective of an embodied jiva.
But even if we concede these points, none of these perspectives on an embodied jivacan gain us access to their perspective--that thing which we have just worked so hard to protect from colonization by our own, limited frameworks of similarity and difference. It is only that jīva's, own, historically specific, utterly unique perspective that can provide us with answers. If we are to rethink the ways we live not just alongside but entangled with actual fleshy, furry, hairy and hairless bodies--bodies whose perspectives on what is right, just or true in any moment might differ radically from our own--we must figure out ways to suspend our own beliefs and allow the Other absolute, unhindered, agency. We must try, knowing we will never succeed, never fully reach our goal, to act according to the Other's perspective.
To begin (or end?) here, allow me to tell one final story. In Death of a Discipline, Spivak looks to yet another version of the blind men and the elephant. In this version, pulled from the work of South African scholar, J.M. Coetzee, a single Magistrate of a small village keeps the peace between the townspeople and the local indigenous population (called barbarians), by defending the legally enforceable, highly racist status quo. At a pivotal moment in the book, the Magistrate attempts to decipher a young barbarian girl whom he is both sleeping with, and providing with food and shelter.54 Spivak notes that his deciphering efforts make evident his repeated generalization that his own meaning and identity are unclear when he tries to imagine himself from the Other's perspective. The Magistrate's attempts at deciphering are expressed by him in the following: “So I continue to swoop and circle about the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of the meaning after another over her.... What does she see? The protecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey still breathes ?''56 He cannot determine what she sees because her perspective is withheld from him. For Spivak, it is because she withholds her perspective that the would-be omniscient sovereign questions the rightness of his actions and his perspective on her and her fellow "barbarians." Subsequently, the next time he witnesses the townspeople abusing one of the barbarians," he steps in, takes upon himself the torture from the townsfolk. 57
Through this story, we can trace three, interrelated concepts that are found in both the Jain tradition and the dialogic tradition of Jainism and poststructuralism that I have been trying to cultivate herein: both traditions affirm that ethical decision making requires one to 1. let go of one's own ego, in order to 2. affirm the Other's radical agency in their own life over one's own, limited view, so that 3. we act out of compassion without attachment, to either our ego or the other.
To begin with the ego, this passage illuminates the power of the logic of the 'to come to shake us free from the ego that is confined by our attachment to both our own identity and our certainty about the Other. By focusing on the parts of the Other that are always reducible, always on their way to us, we pull focus on the self, we limit our negative karmas precisely by refusing to colonize the Other through our perspective. One might say that this is the supreme act of non-violence. This agrees with the Jain focus on the self and with their assumption that
