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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]

The article takes up diverse strands of psychoanalytic thinking to investigate how desire is manifested in male team sporting environments. In particular, it is posited that sporting desire shares a remarkable structural similarity to the joking relationship in that they both work through the overcoming of obstacles. In doing so unconscious desires are long-circuited and only emerge in radically altered form, upending traditional gender and sexual subjectivities in the process. The paper explores the concept of desire from perspectives that are either straightforwardly psychoanalytic or heavily influenced by psychoanalytic thought. Initially, I examine desire from a Freudian viewpoint before looking at how Jacques Lacan extended Freudian analysis through a linguistic lens. I then explore desire in terms developed by Gilles Deleuze before turning, in the second part of the paper, to an examination of the work of George Bataille to consider the desire of sport through the mechanism of the joke to trace the complex routing that it often takes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how pregnancy discrimination at work is perceived by both employers and pregnant employees. Using a public, qualitative dataset collected by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission that offers perspectives from both employers and pregnant employees, we explore the unfair and unethical treatment of pregnant employees at work. Our findings show how pregnant workers are expected to conform with workplace systems that are treated as sacred. We suggest that employer valorization of the mythical figure of 'ideal worker' disadvantages pregnant workers. We observe how, even if this contravenes maternity protection laws, some employers self-justify discrimination against pregnant employees who they perceive to have transgressed 'appropriate' workplace behaviors as ethical and reasonable. To illuminate and conceptualize the notion of transgression, our analysis has led us to the ideas of philosopher Georges Bataille, specifically his reflections on how individuals who 'transgress' social norms are treated as taboo, as well as his metaphorical descriptions of people and practices as either sacred or profane. We theorize that pregnant workers who are treated as profane should be reclassified as sacred, opening up this idea for debate so as to disrupt long-standing patterns of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]