Act, Address, Other: Stamped Letter / the being has crossed?

With Freud, the so‑called failed act stops being a mere failure or simple distraction: it becomes the displaced accomplishment of an unconscious desire, a “serious” psychic act that follows a certain determination and carries meaning, as his analyses in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and later work on bungled actions make clear. What misses its aim on the stage of conscious intention in fact succeeds for the unconscious, in the form of a partial, often disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.

Lacan condenses this in his formula: “a bungled action is a successful discourse,” reminding us that slips, forgettings, clumsy gestures and the “little accidents” of everyday life are genuine formations of the unconscious, bearing a saying that escapes the ego while bearing witness to the subject’s division. When he adds, in his Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, that “a letter always arrives at its destination”, he shifts the question of success to the level of the big Other: the letter reaches its true addressee as soon as it is caught in the chain of signifiers, regardless of the good or bad fortune of its journey.

Žižek, when he takes up this motif with the letter that is not sent and that, precisely for this reason, “saves the world”, pushes this logic to its extreme: sometimes the decision not to perform the expected act; not to send the letter, not to respond in the prescribed way; is the most exact form of address, the one that targets the place where, for a subject, the scope of their act is decided.

So is this still a “failed” act, or can we hear that what, at the level of doing, presents itself as a defect in execution may be, for the subject, the only way to aim right?