It is often said that one of the things most hated by concentration camp guards was when a prisoner chose to commit suicide. In The Inoperative Community Jean-Luc Nancy cites one concentration camp prisoner as suggesting that prisoners often thought of killing themselves, ‘if only to force the SS to run up against the limit of the dead object one will have become’.4 Nancy thinks of this in the way that most others probably think of it: killing themselves would be a form of resistance for the prisoner because the guards would suffer the worst frustration – one cannot discipline or torture a dead object. But, in terms of the argument in this book, it might be argued that the reason the SS found prisoners killing themselves so frustrating is more because of the guards’ understanding that the prisoners were not really dead. In ‘dying’ they had ‘escaped’ and entered the realm of the undead, from where they could continue the business of world domination without this or that particular guard being able to interfere.
Mark Neocleous. The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (2005).