The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008
Perhaps the simplest way of describing the Möbius strip would be to say that it has, at every point, two sides (the surface and its other side), yet there is only one surface. Starting at any point on the strip and continuing the movement along the same side, without ever crossing the edge, we come sooner or later to the reverse side of the point where we started.
Or, as Lacan puts it: an insect walking on this surface can believe at every moment that there is a side which it hasn’t explored, the other side of that on which it walks. It can strongly believe in this other side, in this beyond, even though there is no other side, as we know. Without knowing this, the insect thus explores the only side there is.
The paradox embodied by the topology of the Möbius strip thus consists in there being only one surface (in this sense we are dealing with immanence), yet at every point there is also the other side. It is in this sense that we should understand the concept of inherent contradiction (of the finite) as the generating point of something that is not reducible to simple finitude. [Odd One 54]