His attacks against philosophy strike it as a generality, before the complexities and specialties of epistemology, ontology, philosophy of language, etc. With this view in mind, I will attempt to compare and critique the theoretical enterprise itself, using Bataille's notions as both guidelines and weapons. It can be thought of as the analyses of givens, predictions for the future, the systematic organization of knowledge, the very path along which thought must follow, or even thought itself. Bataille posits knowledge of death not as the end result of a theoretical operation, but as an inner experience from which everything else radiates. Death cannot be regarded as an object of knowledge because it cannot be managed or subordinated by thought.
Death is sovereign, hence inconceivable.
Knowledge of our own mortality can only be peripheral to death itself. Thus, the supposed end-product of theory, knowledge, is declared impossible by Bataille, except for the certainties of death and the discontinuity of beings. Death, in the end, consumes thought. Bataille continues to attack knowledge insofar as it relates to the strivings of theory, with knowledge either as the end product of theory's work or as the presumed foundation from which theory issues. There is not even, in this world, a way of thinking that escapes servitude, an available language such that in speaking it we do not fall back into the immutable rut as soon as we are out of it.