Subjectivity, what we might call consciousness, comes into being when matter communicates with itself about itself, in a reflexive manner. Like hands drawing themselves, like the signals that trees send to other trees to communicate biological risk but consider a tree not talking to other trees but rather talking to itself about itself, sending messages to itself about itself in an analogous manner, against a mirror. The use of the term analogous here is not a casual one - this is quite literally the very same birth process that the formation of an analogy experiences. Consciousness, subjectivity, is an analogy of itself, it comes to life as analogy, through the manner in which it relates to and about itself.
Our subjectivity is a split between two states: the ‘I think’, and the ’thing that thinks’, or you might think of it in other ways like the flat language you give to your thoughts, and the symbolic thought tools that are fuelled by shadowed unknowable intentions to approach knowing. This split is the subject itself, is our subjectivity. Within the split is, as long as we live, an always manifesting, antagonistic potential that moves always within a position of incompleteness. This incompleteness is not an epistemological incompleteness, of not knowing enough about one own limitations of possible perceptions, but rather it is an ontological incompleteness, rising out of a negative space, out of this split, that we might consider as less than nothing.
So, let’s call this negative state of potentiality minus one (-1), this state of less than nothing in which our subjectivity resides, positioned not only at but as the intersection between zero (0), what we might call the democracy of objects around us, and plus one (1), the projected state of our idealised conceptions of these objects, that which we see around us in a positive state of being. Our subjectivity here should again be reemphasised not as something or nothing but as less than nothing, as a sublimation, a gap, a split that is always ontologically incomplete and in analogous dialogue with itself in much the same way that matter talked to itself about itself in order to create subjective consciousness in the beginning. Think of a möbius strip and its halfway there.
It might be tempting to see this as another dualism, or even as another structural trilogy, like the father son and holy ghost or the three blind mice or the third eye or whatever, but rather it is more accurate to see it as two that is also one, as a dialectic that is not seeking a resolution of say two becomes one but rather as an antagonism that supports this structure through conflict, through dialogue, in a manner that one can only exist within the antagonism between two dualities. Think of midday, the moment when one becomes two, it is a gap that is made manifest because of the two periods of time on either side through which it intersects. That gap is you.