ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to some of the educational resonances of the thought of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. While later chapters will explore how aspects of their thought can contribute to conceiving of forms of educational experience at a distance from the humanist legacy, here more obviously critical aspects of their thought are applied. Dominant forms of educational practice are shown to surreptitiously exhibit elements of what Bataille calls productive and unproductive expenditure. Features of the more pernicious elements of education as a cultural device are then studied in Blanchot's short stories, or récits, The Idyll and The Last Word, revealing how expenditure is only valued, in the dominant educational economy, inasmuch as it re-entrenches social order and, within it, already existing power and privilege.
