NEW!!! Empedocles: love and strife is being revived in the 2004
    Olympics of the Mind series at the Steki Taverna, Newtown.
    Bookings with Steki on 9516-2191.

Through this page you'll find information about this play, along with five short extracts.

Love and Strife was originally written for the 1998-99 season of Philosophy Nights at the Steki Taverna, a Greek restaurant in Newtown, Sydney, at which audiences eat, drink, and heckle while watching a loose group of performers and philosophers present reconstructions, dialogues, and other dramatic variations on the history of western and eastern philosophy.

Love and Strife has since been performed in Armidale, Medlow Bath, and at the Friend in Hand pub in Glebe. It's a mixed-up medley on the life and thought of the wild shamanic pre-Socratic, Empedocles of Acragas. With Diogenes Laertius, the ancient gossip, as M.C., the audience are taught about immortality, blending, and beans by the strangely reincarnated and unnecessarily grumpy mystagogue. Holderlin, Matthew Arnold, and Freud turn up to share their ecstatic encounters with Empedocles' work; Aristotle and some equally picky modern critics get what they deserve; and Nietzsche, planning a tragic drama about Empedocles' death in Etna, duets on the cosmic cycle.

Many thanks to Ed Spence for his work on the Philosophy Nights series, and especially to the various cast members: Chris Burgess, Fiona Jenkins, Doris McIlwain, Dan Smith, and Caroline West. I will put up information and links when I get a chance on the other background material to the text (which improvises on and around fragments and texts written by and about Empedocles), and on the recent discovery of a new Empedocles papyrus fragment.

To find out more about the show, email me.

If you'd like to be on the mailing list for future Philosophy Nights, call the Steki Taverna on (02) 9516 2191.

EXTRACTS

Extract #1 The Sphere, Love, and Strife: metaphysical advices

Extract #2 Empedocles' death: Diogenes' tales

Extract #3 Freud on Empedocles

Extract #4 Pores and Effluences: Empedocles on perception

Extract #5 Blood and Thinking

Extracts copyright John Sutton 1999.

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Last updated 23 July 2004.