“We are in each of these cases caught in a chiasmic relation, one in which the terms to be related also partake of one another, but do not collapse into one another.” Butler in talk with Connolly
Our embodied subjectivity is never located purely in either our tangibility or in our touching, but in the intertwining of these two aspects, or where the two lines of a chiasm intersect with one another. The chiasm then, is simply an image to describe how this overlapping and encroachment can take place between a pair that nevertheless retains a divergence, in that touching and touched are obviously never exactly the same thing.