If you want more, you desire an object, and there is a decent chance that a neighbor (or at least someone on your block) has that piece.
The only thing more problematic than desiring a beautiful object, I've discovered, is owning it.
When an available object matches a desired object a trade can be made.
The idea for pairing Atta with Kleist (whose act of murder-suicide we call the first performance art) in a dialogue (the two bookend figures as it were) came out of a conversation Jody had with Andrew DuBois about Wallace Stevens and his phrase "desire without an object of desire," which we thought was crucial to the psychology of the artist-suicide and the suicide pilot.
The most appalling of these devices can look like a desired object — a can of food or a toy.
'Eros' originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940).
This produces the felt tension similar to that which occurs in the case of an inaccessible desired object: a tension between the pleasure associated with the presence of the care-giver and the pain of being without the approval of that person.
The research quantitatively demonstrates how the desired lifetime of an object or a collection can be increased by adjusting the frequency of access, as mechanical deterioration is proportional to the number instances of user access.
On Amazon in particular, one-click shopping and next-day delivery form a kind of Penn & Teller of impossible-seeming convenience, with a tap of the finger transforming a spontaneous desire into the desired object: a banana slicer, say, or a Harry Potter beach towel.
Another change in the concept of askēsis occurred in ancient Greece when the notion of such training was applied to the realm of ethics in the ideal of the sage who is able to act freely to choose or refuse a desired object or an act of physical pleasure.
"Every malady (Übel), every unsatisfied drive, every unassuaged longing, every sense of absence [i.e. of a desired object] is an irritating or stimulating injury and negation of the drive-to-happiness innate in each living and sensing being, and the countervailing affirmation of the drive-to-happiness, accompanied by representations and consciousness, is what we call 'will'" (M, 367).
