"According to the law that what man despises is also what he fears resembles him, the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face." (Agamben, 52)

Something triggered in my memory when I came to this line, and I realized that it reminded me of Freud's Oedipus complex as discussed, I believe, in "The Uncanny." In both of these instances, a human subjected to marginalization by a greater force at power (the woman and the Muselmann) appears to another being as inferior to a degree; the woman has been conquered by castration, the Muselmann has been denigrated as a non-being unable to experience neither life nor death. But doesn't Freud view his concept of the uncanny as a return to an earlier state of things, even a return to death? Does a man, when confronted with the Muselmann, seek a return at all in that vein?