So Jouissance the same thing that pleasure is on a scale where pleasure is limited by the ‘good’ it does to the organism, but which keeps going beyond the service of the subject.
One may say that warfare is a result of jouissance. We may even say that religious inspiration is a form of making jouissance attainable to the mind, and that art is a way of preventing pleasure from becoming jouissance, and post-structuralist art is the very expression of this act. It is taming the drive so that it condenses before it becomes jouissance, and becomes a form of death and suffering unto death.
All artforms of the American age tease us into jouissance, they open the world around the pleasure-principle-based subject to a slight degree, create a space circumfering that subject’s “need”-structure, a veritable jungle of excess, of cultivated excess, of “Hollywood”, of that place where one can not enter but with which one is in constant dialogue.
In the world of Jouisscance-disclosed, which is what Hollywood and the music industry have become, man is enabled to transcend his organic subjectivity and participate, for a while at a time, in a world where the subject is not actually bound to his organic limits. It replaces the less potent form that was religion, where man was able to transcend his organic subjectivity via ideals of sexual goodness, of a place where pleasure is endless but abstract and not-yet -attained - religion provides us with a hermetically sealed aquarium of what lies beyond - and this prospect, the idea of our entitlement to it, provides a pleasure that is capable of keeping the organism huddled up in his own reality, content in letting it pass for what it is.
Hollywood (I use this term very generally to indicate the whole desire-culture that was birthed the beginning of the past century) opens up the gates of “heaven” (that which is meant for gods and not mere organic mortals, beasts) just a tiny splintered bit so that the light of what-could-be comes shining through and compels every man to figure out ways to justify his own presence within those walls. It is at once fiercely barbaric compared to religion and terribly brave. Man turns out to be sufficiently plasmaic to, on fortunate occasions, rise to the new horizon. It turns out man is not bound by the “right to pleasure” as given by his parental structure and his organic hermetic identity. His mind is capable of creating such excessive realms that actually do host life.
Many do not yet believe in the validity of this creation, and it is true that it causes more death and entropy than it causes realized joy - but the philosophical issue is that joy that it does allow, and this again relates to the master-slave dialectic, wherein the master makes the slave suffer for his attained-jouissance, for the pleasure that he derives from transgressing the limits of his own hermetic being.