Translator. Chaos and Splendor by Eduardo Lourenço. Dartmouth: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. 2002.

 [Excerpt]

Translation of Chaos and Splendor by Eduardo Lourenço

On the level of pure knowledge, gnoseology and the apology of chaos have no more justification than the impossibility of conceiving a rational order worth of its name. And, as this order is real – above all if it is compared with the belief that has maintained it in the Modern Age – the fascination with the chaotic figure is positive and can be beneficial. It is more debatable whether this fascination exists in a world of order that would confer meaning, even a polemical one, to the value judgments in areas as diverse as human action (singular or collective), ethics, aesthetics, justice and, in a loose sense, good and evil, that is to say, the aspects of human life that we consider acceptable and unacceptable.

[…]

In truth, when chaos emerges in the figure of a person, such as the Devil did in the diverse societies of the “Middle Ages,” imposing his presence and irresistible destructive power, there is no order that can survive without realizing to the point of self-destruction, the principle that sustains it and the world in which it has been inserted.