Reading this, I was struck by how it reminded me of a talk that slowly warped and wrapped a statement to build up the Y-combinator. The process takes a self-referential function and slowly works the self out of it.
Honestly, I'm not at all sure turning a function anonymous is actually similar to making a sentence passive, but maybe re-watching that video now I'll have that je ne sais quoi that'll let me actually grok the process.