See the essays by Maria Bolesti on the middle voice:
"From the subject of the crisis to the subject in crisis: Middle voice on Greek walls," Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 2: 1 (2016) pp. 3–28. https://worldpece.org/content/bolestim-middle-debt-and-crisis
Abstract:
As a grammatical mode in which the subject remains inside the action, the middlevoice has been said to unsettle binary distinctions between active/passive, orperpetrator/victim. This article revisits theorizations of the middle voice by RolandBarthes, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and others, andexplores its potential in fostering alternative accounts of the contemporary Greeksubject against the backdrop of popular discourses on the Greek ‘crisis’. The middlevoice takes centre-stage in a currently popular Greek wall-writing featuring the word vasanizomai (‘I am in torment’) – a wall-writing that also plays an instrumentalrole in the recent novella by Sotiris Dimitriou
Konta stin koilia/Close to the belly (2014). In the face of hegemonic discourses that narrativize the Greek crisis as krisis
(judgement and distinction) between perpetrators and victims, vasanizomai signalsa different kind of crisis: it unsettles dominant accounts of the Greek subject thateither hold Greek people responsible for the crisis (e.g., the stereotype of the ‘lazyGreek’) or cast them as disempowered victims of a political system or of uncontrol-lable global forces. By enabling an agency grounded in the subject’s publicly shared vulnerability, vasanizomai de-centres the notion of the liberal ‘willing’ subject but also of the subject as fully determined by ideology. While a middle voice discourse harbours political pitfalls, the article lays out the conditions under which it couldconstitute a critical tool, able to accommodate voices of dispossessed individuals.
"Recasting the Indebted Subject in the Middle Voice." Social Science Information (creative commons license) https://worldpece.org/content/boletsim-middle-voice-and-debt
Abstract:
This article traces the interrelation of two forms of debt – financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past – in order to propose a rethinking of the discourse of debt through the ‘middle voice’, understood both as a grammatical category and, more generally, as an expressive modality that can take shape through different media. Can we revisit discourses of debt through ‘grammars’ that could restore a form of agency to the ‘indebted subject’ and disrupt the asymmetrical power relation between debtor and creditor? To explore this question, the article turns to literary and artistic responses to the discourse of debt against the backdrop of the Greek debt crisis. Through a close reading of the novella Close to the Belly (2014) by Sotiris Dimitriou and an untitled art installation by Stefania Strouza (2011), it traces how these works cast the subject as produced by the discourse of debt and test alternative conceptions of the indebted subject through the modality of the middle voice. Dimitriou’s novella tries to transcend both the moral discourse of financial debt and the debt to the past by envisioning a disengagement from all debt, which eventually yields a society without past and future. By contrast, Strouza’s installation reconfigures the debtor-creditor relation without renouncing debt altogether. By staging an encounter between Sophocles’ Antigone and Marx’s Capital, it transforms the power relation of debtor and creditor into a deictic exchange that makes these positions malleable and reversible. Through these works, the article explores the conditions for reconsidering the notion of debt through the modality of the middle voice and the risks but also the politically promising possibilities the middle voice opens up for conceiving the indebted subject and the temporality of debt otherwise.
I work a little with the middle voice in Advocacy After Bhopal, drawing from Derrida's Margins of Philosophy. Chapter 1, p38:
… Disaster implodes clear distinction between the active and the passive. One can no longer tell whether subjects are acting or being acted upon. All move within processes that they affect without controlling. Subjects accomplish things that are accomplished in them. Progressive advocates end up in the middle voice.
The middle voice is the modality of disaster. It is a way of speaking that builds in awareness that the system that one critiques also operates within the critique. It is a way of understanding how actors within complex systems are distribution points-sending out messages, but also being encoded by them-making change happen, but also being changed.6
Footnote 6, p369:
In an active voice, the advocate would bear gifts. In the middle voice, the advocate would distribute gifts she herself had received. Derrida explains the philosophical context:
And we will see why that which lets itself be designated differdnce is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middlevoice,
saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression. (Derrida 1986 [1972], 9)
Derrida, Jacques. 1986 [1972]. Margins of Philosophy, translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.