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Rethinking Anekantavāda and Animality... 131. you can never really know another fully, as highlighted in the concepts of anekāntavāda, nayavāda and syädvåda.
But Spivak adds to this the attempt to deconstruct your own ego--to focus on yourself--precisely by trying and failing to see yourself through the Other's perspective. In trying to see himself through the eyes of the barbarian--in trying to realize what she might want or need from him-the Magistrate realizes that he cannot decipher how she might see him precisely because he cannot decipher or know her. The meaning of both the embodied jiva and the ego (or sovereign subject position) of the magistrate are destabilized in this process of imagining oneself through the eyes of the Other. Spivak states, "this is the structure that can open into responsibility with the subaltern Other whose definition rests in an irreducible figure.""""
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According to this narrative, one's own ego-identity is destabilized precisely by the privileging of the Other's agency and not through self-imposed or restricted limits. This combines the letting go of ego with a intense respect for the Other jiva. For Spivak, the ethical relation to the Other is provoked by the Other's radical alterity and status as an irreducible, embodied jiva and therefore it must be routed through her alterity first, not through our own knowledges. Rather than learning or commenting about populations, about particular embodied jīvas and what particular scriptures say about how to act toward them, Spivak suggests that the ethical relation is routed through the undecidability of our own identity in the eyes of the Other." In this way, our ego is undone precisely by the agency of the Other we are supposed to uphold, and we participate in this undoing through the practice of remaining open to the ways that we are imagined by the Other's indecipherable perspective. To phrase this in the logic of Jainism, this is an example of the moment our better selves, our pure self, lets go of the attachments of the ego for the sake of the Other. The with-holding of her perspective, the irreducibility and unkowability of her perspective, make it impossible for the magistrate's ego to completely attach itself: it tries, again and again, but slips off, like water on a leaf.
Moving on to the concept of the other's agency, we can see that this ego detachment is actually the result of a truly radical appreciation and respect for the life course and subject position of each singularity, each embodied jiva. Jainism shares this extremely strong sense of the agency and path of the Other and values all lives inherently, without having to sentimentalize them." They do not perform the troublesome gesture of which Deleuze and Guattari's accuse many western philosophers and householders, infantalizing non-humans as cute, little, family pet creatures-oedipal animals. According to Kundakunda, each embodied jiva is responsible for its own life and therefore, it does not need you to pity it, change it, remove it from its circumstances or otherwise interfere with the course of its path to mokṣa." This is the reason ahimsa is often (mis)conceived as a principle of non-interference.
Finally, however, these traditions differ in one key way. For Jainism, the agency is of the Other, non-human jiva's is set out before hand, by the Omniscients and is confined to certain forms of interaction freedom, their identity as an animal, as a five--sensed being without reason, does not allow the possibility of their perspectives to act as a disruptive ethical force on its own. But for
