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.
