Rothenberg on page 201: For Lacan … every individual becomes a subject in an encounter with the Other (an Other that is far from radically other). This encounter functions as the extimate cause of the subject*: every subject is non-self-coincident; every subject incorporates the other at its core; every subject’s inside is an outside. Every subject is, from the get-go, a Möbius subject.
:): Rothenberg argues that in the encounter with another person, the very fact that we can never know what we mean to the other person, their interpretation of our message as we speak to them. This is because of the excessive nature of our relations with other humans. When she says this other is at the core of ourselves, R is suggesting that we’re never in control, we are not the centred subject, an egological “I”. But this isn’t new.
We can recall first that the Möbius subject’s excess or non-self-coincidence derives from its inability to know its own meaning for others. … The subject’s experience of its own excess provides the motive for entering into the social relation, criss-crossed by fantasy though it is. 202
The encounter with the other functions as the extimate cause of the subject* The Möbius subject incorporates the other at it core. Every Möbius subject begins its social life as an extimate subject — its fundament is already a function of otherness. 202
In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact, the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire for relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness. At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: this other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space.