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This paper argues that the dominant modes of academic address, the conference paper, the journal article, and the monograph, reinforce problematic and exclusionary assumptions concerning what counts as legitimate research, whilst also restricting academic enquiry and impoverishing intellectual life. It makes its case by exploring in some detail the intellectual commitments of one the West's more wayward 20th century thinkers, Georges Bataille. It suggests that Bataille presents not simply a conceptual armoury (and one among many) for critiquing Western logocentrism from within, but offers an example of what a less domesticated, less stylistically narrowed mode of thinking might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes on and explores the disturbing and perhaps counter-intuitive notion that the university is the place where the intellect goes to die. This idea is explored alongside Georges Bataille's suggestion that the death of thought might actually be a worthy pursuit and only thought which seeks its own limits is worth striving for. The deleterious effects of the university upon thought are nonetheless contrasted to Bataille's own attempts to take thought to the point of its expiration. The key difference between the 'teaching of death' that Bataille has in mind, and the enactment of the death of thinking that the university achieves is this: Bataille seeks, however impossibly, to bring death "into the field of vision". Academic knowledge production, by contrast, with its systematism, its rigor, its proceduralism and its subsumption by work, merely abandons the thinking subject to the inevitable result, which for Bataille, is unthinking servility, a premature, utterly suppressed, and domesticated, death-in-life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]