Who is Marquis de Sade from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 and what is their importance? Visions_of_Excess:_Selected_Writings_1927-1939 English & Literature "Marquis de Sade | Visions of Excess: Selected Writings

Marquis de Sade is the name of an author and literary character whose example Bataille uses in "Visions" to express base natural forms as symbols of noble or sacred abstraction. For example, Bataille tells a story about the confined madman Marquis de Sade plucking petals off the most beautiful roses to toss them "into a ditch filled with liquid manure." Bataille tells another tale of the Marquis de Sade who is imprisoned in the Bastille and screams into the dirty water pipe to terrified people in Paris that "they are killing the prisoners!"