Death and Alterity (the "Other")

Heuristically, is it helpful to posit the following two ways of thinking about death?

(1) Death as part of the life cycle
(2) Death as the ultimate experience of the Other

(1) If we attempt to see death as part of the life cycle, what happens? It doesn't necessarily indicate any greater acceptance of death, does it? Accepting death as "natural" need not entail any more acceptance of death except insofar as we "accept" other natural disasters like earthquakes and, for the ancients, eclipses. In other words, the acceptance of death as fact doesn't logically (or historically) necessitate acceptance of death as just another phase to be equated with any other stage of the life cycle. Moreover, the power of earthquakes, floods, and eclipses to frighten, mystify, destroy, and even empower (the elites) is not unequivocally diminished by an understanding of them as natural. Earthquakes are scary and destructive whether they are the work of gods or plates. Death is, too.

Is death more frightening as part of nature? If it were something supernatural, there might be a way out—an elixir, a trick to bamboozle the gods with, or a misty island on a distant shore.

(2) Seeing death as Alterity per se does what? There is a more immediate and irrevocable—or at least unavoidable—sense of self-loss implied in this conception, I would argue. The subsumption of the Self into the Other is a horrifying and abject proposition. Grant for a moment that Buddhism is essentially right to equate attachment with suffering, and then consider what you are most attached to... Chances are, it's you. And chances are that the loss of that most-attached-you would lead to the greatest suffering. So if death is seen as the loss of the Me in the Other, well, it's certainly not uplifting.

So what happens when you have the Death=Other paradigm dominant, and you start personifying death? What about the Death=Stage model?

Or what if—brainstorm—the two models are vying for intellectual and emotional hegemony? Then what does the personification of death mean?

I think that even if my models are all messed up (a proposition more likely true than not, since it's all just logorrhea anyway...) the personification of death is about a certain closeness. I mean by this both physical proximity and a reduction of emotional distance. If Death walks amongst us, we are physically close to it. The marginal, liminal, and polluted associations that death brings with it are invading our realm. This is different than having a separate Hell—it is the encroachment of Hellishness and infernality into the banal world of our everyday. How can we allow this? Well, I'm thinking that it's probably because we've already recognized (subconsciously) a reduced psycho-emotional barrier or distance. Could this be a result of a sense that society is dying? Are there other possibilities?

How do our fears of (and implied recognition of potency in) the Other, the liminal, the marginalized, and the polluted play out more generally? Here's an avenue on which good research has been done, so if the Death=Other hypothesis makes any sense I'd be able to take off from solid ground by appropriating a whole discourse on alterity to examine death. That may already have been done, too, come to think of it...

That's the real problem, isn't it? Nihil sub sole novum.

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Several other updates for those of you who've earned them by sticking with me this far:
-Saw a fox @ University City Station Monday, happily munching carrion on one of the athletic fields. Hope it wasn't one of Penn's athletes...
-Just came back from the department fall party, which Tomomi and the kids attended, too. Much fun was had by all.
-My laptop remains broken. My new keyboard arrived today, but UPS had bent it in transit, so I have to wait at least until Friday for the replacement replacement.

That's all for now—everything below is just Japanese...

月曜日は「学園都市駅(University City Station)」で、正体不明の動物の死骸をおいしそうに頬張っている狐をみた。なぜか、お稲荷さんが食べたくなった。
先ほど、我が学科の秋祭り(ただのパーティだけど、日本人には「祭」の響きがいいかなと)から帰宅したところ。家族4人で行って、友美たちをいろいろな人に紹介しまくった。皆、楽しかったようで何よりです。

以上（異常？）です