Žižek’s reply to Johnston et. al. from a 2010 issue of Subjectivity
Something is missing here in this vision of the archaic natural substance, which is gradually, but never completely civilized or ‘mediated’ by the symbolic order. We find the first indication of this third dimension – neither nature nor culture – already in Kant, for whom discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality. As Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated as their behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical – ‘noumenal’ or even monstrous – sense. The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive.
It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the ‘birth of man’ are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a ‘being of language’ bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly ‘perverted’, ‘denaturalized’, ‘derailed’ nature, which is not yet culture.
In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny ‘unruliness’ that seems to be inherent to human nature – a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this ‘unruliness’ that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this ‘unruliness’, not the animal nature in man. … the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards.
we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on. However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly metaphysical, passion.
the excess of sexuality itself that threatens to explode the ‘civilized’ constraints, sexuality as unconditional Passion, is the result of Culture. … In this way, the civilization/Culture retroactively posits/transforms its own natural presupposition: culture retroactively ‘denaturalizes’ nature itself, and this is what Freud called the Id, libido.
So, back to Johnston, this retroactive excess of de-naturalized nature is missing in the image he proposes of a gradual cultural ‘mediation’ of nature.