Today is Marquis de Sade‘s 268th birthday. Was he our first postmodernist? The man who showed us that words are not necessarily representations of reality. That one can construct limits of text only. The first modernist too: by transgressing all rules, showed us that there are rules. Above all the Marquis has proven a tough act to follow. One can divide modernity in pre- and post-Sadean. Anyone wishing to transgress (in words, not in deeds) has only one reference, the Marquis himself. The only possible answer to his antics are incorporating his sensibility without following his monomania.

David Locher writes[1] in “Postmodernism as Neo-Dada”

“At the heart of postmodernism lies the assumption that most of the things that we take for granted are, in fact, simply illusions. Reality is not reflected within text, only text is reflected within text. There is no Truth beyond the experience of the text, and meaning is created every time the text is experienced. An author does not place meaning in the text, and his/her interpretation of the text is no more valid than any other (Baudrillard 1981; 1988; Connor 1989; Lyotard 1984). In other words, meaning is arbitrary, relative, and subjective. Language is, in its own way, reality. What we refer to as reality is not knowable, and we live in the illusion that we are in touch with it. The age in which concepts have a relation to reality is over (Baudrillard and Debrix 1995). Knowledge is only validated when it is referred to by second-level discourse (Lyotard 1984).”