No middle voice.

George S. Howard

doi:10.1037/h0091112

Antonio Negri

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0029 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ingrid Diran

Keyword(s):

Critical Distance ◽

Middle Voice ◽

The Subject ◽

Definition Of ◽

Antonio Negri

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.

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An Outline of Middle Voice in Syriac

10.31826/9781463221270 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Margherita Farina

Keyword(s):

Middle Voice

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Hearing the ‘Voice’ of the Niphal: A Response to Ellen van Wolde

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament ◽

10.1177/0309089220916506 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 45 (3) ◽

pp. 291-308

Author(s):

Ethan C. Jones

Keyword(s):

Old Testament ◽

Hebrew Bible ◽

External Argument ◽

Middle Voice ◽

External Agent ◽

The Voice ◽

Previous Volume

This article responds to the innovative and stimulating research by Ellen van Wolde in a previous volume of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. She claims that the Niphal is middle voice and can be passive, ‘if (and only if) an external argument, coded as an external Agent, is present’. My research however, demonstrates that such a description of the passive is both inadequate in view of the world’s languages and incongruent with Niphal. In addition, my response lays bare how such a prescription of the middle voice to the Niphal in the Hebrew Bible is circulus probando and unconvincing.

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