For Merleau-Ponty, the body itself mediates the relationship between subject and object, self and other. The body is both subject and object "because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things" ( 1968, 123).