Bodily Chiasms 1

Abstract

The theory of the body I want to explore here, assumes that researcher and researched are part of the same flesh of the world and can be understood in radical conjunction and not in duality. An interview is examined, first from the lifeworld (nursing) research paradigm and thereafter on the hand of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the reversibility of touching and being touched, wherein ‘subject’ (who touches) and ‘object’ (who is touched) are radically interrelated and coconstituted. Merleau-Ponty develops his reflections on this radical interaction as the ‘chiasm’.

Although investigating the ‘chiasm’ can be seen as lifeworld research, the more common lifeworld approach only leads to rich description, which lacks the radical relational understanding of Merleau-Ponty's insights. I believe that acknowledgement of the chiasms of interrelationship reveals complex processes of enfoldment taking place between researcher and researched, writer and reader. All of them are enclosed in what Merleau-Ponty called the enfoldments or flesh of the world; which makes it very difficult to determine who touches whom and who is touched by whom. Research, when it tries to see, interpret and study the other, focuses on the visible of touching and being touched; but these inherently carry with them the invisible of the same actions. The consequences of these relationships for my study of a specific elderly woman are explored here.