the sender always receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form,“ "the repressed always returns,” “the frame itself is always being framed by part of its content,” “we cannot escape the symbolic debt, it always has to be settled,” which are all ultimately variations on the same basic premise that “there is no metalanguage.” So let us begin by explaining the impossibility of metalanguage apropos of the Hegelian figure of the “Beautiful Soul,” deploring the wicked ways of the world from the position of an innocent, impassive victim. The “Beautiful Soul” pretends to speak a pure metalanguage, exempted from the corruption of the world, thereby concealing the way its own moans and groans partake actively in the corruption it denounces. In his “Intervention on Transference,” Lacan relies on the dialectic of the “Beautiful Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination? / Soul” to designate the falsity of the hysterical subjective position: “Dora,” Freud’s famous analysand, complains of being reduced to a pure object in a play of intersubjective exchanges (her father is allegedly offering her to Mister K. as if in compensation for his own flirtation with Miss K.), i.e., she presents this exchange as an objective state of things in the face of which she is utterly helpless; Freud’s answer is that the function of this stance of passive victimization by cruel circumstances is just to conceal her complicity and collusion-the square of intersubjective exchanges can only sustain itself insofar as Dora assumes actively her role of victim, of an object of exchange, in other words, insofar as she finds libidinal satisfaction in it, insofar as this very renunciation procures for her a kind of perverse surplus enjoyment. A hysteric continually complains of how he cannot adapt himself to the reality of cruel manipulation, and the psychoanalytic answer to it is not “give up your empty dreams, life is cruel, accept it as it is” but quite the contrary “your moans and groans are false since, by means of them, you are only too well adapted to the reality of manipulation and exploitation:” by playing the role of helpless victim, the hysteric assumes the subjective position which enables him to “blackmail emotionally his environs,” as we would put it in today’s jargon. This answer, in which the “Beautiful Soul” is confronted with how it actually partakes of the wicked ways of the world, closes the circuit of communication: in it, the subject/sender receives from the addressee his own message in its true form, i.e., the true meaning of his moans and groans. In other words, in it, the letter that the subject put into circulation “arrives at its destination,” which was from the very beginning the sender himself: the letter arrives at its destination when the subject is finally forced to assume the true consequences of his activity. This is how Lacan…interpreted the Hegelian dictum about the rationality of the real (“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational”): the true meaning of the subject’s words or deeds-their reason-is disclosed by their actual consequences, so the subject has no right to shrink back from them and say “But I didn’t mean it!

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