From Dominick LaCapra's critique of White's argument for the middle voice in Holocaust representation:
In a sense one's response to the role of the middle voice may be intimately bound up with one's response to reenacting or acting out trauma in relation to attempts to work it through. In my own tentative judgment, the use in historiography of some discursive analogue of the middle voice might be most justified with respect to one's most tangled and difficult relations of proximity and distance with regard to the other, notably when one is moved, even shaken or unsettled, in such a manner that one is unable or unwilling to judge or even to predicate with any degree of confidence. Hence something like a middle voice that suspended judgment or approached it only in the most tentative terms might be called for with respect to ambiguous figures in Primo Levi's gray zone, for example, certain well-intentioned but deceived and at times self-deceived members of Jewish Councils (such as Adam Czerniakow of the Warsaw Ghetto) who were indeed caught in double binds not of their own making. It might also be pertinent-and extremely difficult of attainment-in the case of certain victims who were also perpetrators, notably someone like Tadeusz Borowski, who reacted to his experience in an excruciating, unsettling manner both demanding and repelling the empathy of the reader. The fate of certain victims in even more dire and less compromising circumstances is often such that it makes the use of any voice problematic for the historian, notably including a voice that enacts identification. In any event, the use of the middle voice would require modulations of proximity and distance, empathy and irony with respect to different "objects" of investigation, and it need not be understood as ruling out all forms of objectivity and objectification.
In yet another, more affirmative register, there is a sense in which the middle voice may be related to an unheard-of utopia of generosity or gift giving beyond, or in excess of, calculation, positions, judgment, and victimization of the other. It may also exceed both delimited conceptions of justice and historiography in any form we would now recognize. (pp-29-30)
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing history, writing trauma. JHU Press, 2014.
