Consciousness as abstracted from experiencing is relational, that is, must always have an object. You abstract the notion of consciousness from your relatedness to objects. Such relationality is not a twoness but a threeness - you could say that the third is what distinguishes object from subject, breaks their symmetry, or you could say it is the frame in which relationality can take place, what brings the two together and keeps them apart. This line of thinking is enough to conclude that consciousness implicitly takes itself as object alongside or surrounding its definitive object. If it is just a relation without this latent reflexivity then it isn't yet what we could call consciousness. Reflexivity however invites infinite regression and it is not sufficient to say that it tricks itself into the illusion of reflexivity because the reflexivity is what enables the illusion. The alternative is that consciousness need not have an object - this being necessarily outside of all experiencing. What would consciousness without an object be 'like'? Well, certainly not like consciousness with object then deprived of object - the deprivation would then be another kind of object. At least see that consciousness without an object cannot be ruled out by any consideration of sufficient reason.