BEAUTY & AFFLICTION: HOROSCOPES
WEEK OF DECEMBER 4
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“And so, today, the chains of love have given way to the hell of freedom.” —Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm
“Beauty always promises and never gives; it creates hunger, but it has no nourishment for the part of the soul trying here below to fill itself; it only nourishes the part of the soul that grazes. It creates desire, and it gives the clear sense that there is nothing in it to desire, for one wants that nothing in it should change. But should one not look for ways to get out of the delicious torments that it inflicts, then this desire bit by bit is transformed into love, and it forms a seed of the faculty of pure and gracious love. To the degree that affliction is hideous, so is the true expression of affliction supremely beautiful.” —Simone Weil, Late Philosophical Writings
Tomorrow, Venus enters her exile in Scorpio after squaring Pluto. What she loses in dignity, she gains in newfound vision—-sight of the banished, vanished one. Sitting with beauty’s delicious torments. Think of the twistedlypretty sculptural dolls of Hans Bellmer or Georges Bataille’s erotic, saintly-dirty philosophies—-XXX—-or Dante penning his starlessly glamorous visions of hell from Florentine exile. Eroticism, death, and sensuality——in Erotism, Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille writes, “Eroticism springs from an alternation of fascination and horror, of affirmation and denial.” Or Spinoza’s we don’t yet know what a body can do. Venus in Scorpio, like Venus in Aries, is Venus in the home of Mars, her counterpart, opposite, lover, ex—-and thus she uses his stuff, war and hardcore. How to forge union? The error that is eros, a diehard weird ordeal.
More—-plus horoscopes, below——
