A Response to "Objects of Affection"

The exhibition review below reminded me of the following paragraph from The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects by Peter Schwenger, a captivating book on the world of objects and humans that is full of wonder and displacements:

"[...] the search for the origins of our desires in relation to objects will always be a futile one. The common strategy is first to isolate objects from the world by acts of selection and then to group these objects according to principles of proper placement. But what is "proper" is only the matrix of a discourse, not the innate property of an object. Nor ultimately can the objects that are our property shore up in our selves the sense of le propre. No matter how carefully we arrange the museum of the self, placement comes down to much the same thing as displacement. Desire tries to consolidate a world of separate things but succeeds only in displaying its own restless movement, interminable as that of dreams." (139)