MIDDLE VOICE AND MEDIALITY — PHILOSOPHICAL POSSIBILITIES AND LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS?

Abstract

This paper explores how languages that do not conform to the active–passive verbal diatheses can offer alternatives to subject-centered modes of thought. Benveniste noted that, in the ancient Indo-European middle voice, processes occur not outside but within the subject. Due to the marginalization of the middle voice, Benveniste emphasized the need for a new grammar of action. But can we conceive a grammar that is not organized around the subject? Nietzsche critiques the belief in the centrality of the grammatical subject: Language imposes the subject–predicate structure onto reality, suggesting an acting subject, whereas in fact, there is only happening. In constructions such as der Blitz blitzt, a pseudo-subject is grammatically forced. Heidegger’s verbal ontology — die Welt weltet, die Sprache spricht, das Nichts nichtet, das Ereignis ereignet — does not aim to unmask linguistic illusion but rather presents language as an event that discloses Being. If we attempt to rehabilitate the ‘philosophy of the middle voice’ against the binary opposition of active and passive voices, a fundamental question remains: Are we capable of distancing ourselves from this binarity at the level of language? Old Chinese, Japanese, and Korean do not clearly align with the active–passive verbal division. Byung-Chul Han describes Old Chinese as a language characterized by indifference to the active-passive distinction, as well as emptiness, absencing, and selflessness. In Korean, omitting the agent or patient evokes a sense of unfolding events. Japanese also has a verbal category (jihatsu) that expresses spontaneous action without an explicit subject. My thesis is that, although both the middle voice and Old Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are free from a strict active–passive opposition, in the case of the middle voice, the happening is internalized within the subject, whereas in the above-mentioned Far Eastern languages it is subjectless. In the light of Far Eastern languages, the middle voice, the problem of the subject, and the binary subject–object dichotomy, all embedded in language, appear in a new light.