[cwzwarich]

There are a lot of other Haskell features you can use. Term-level recursion works:

  f :: a -> b
  f = f

Type-level recursion works, even without explicit term-level recursion:

  data T a b = C (T a b -> (a -> b))
  
  q :: T a b -> (T a b -> (a -> b))
  q (C f) = f

  w :: T a b -> (a -> b)
  w x = (q x) x

  f :: a -> b
  f = w (C w)

This is basically encoding Russell's paradox at the type level. You can write out f explicitly, just so that it doesn't look like you might somehow still be applying w to itself recursively:

  g :: a -> b
  g = (\x -> ((\(C f) -> f) x) x) (C (\x -> ((\(C f) -> f) x) x))

There are even ways of doing this using highly impredicative definitions involving GADTs and type families, without involving any explicit recursion at all:

http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/impredicativity-bites.html

The GADT example no longer seems to work, so changes to GADT type checking might have eliminated it, but the type family one still does.

[applicative]

It doesn't affect your objection to MaleKitten but not all types are occupied in Haskell. You are thinking of kind * By contrast,

    {-#LANGUAGE DataKinds#-}
    a :: 'Nothing
    a = a

and

    {-#LANGUAGE MagicHash#-}
    import GHC.Prim
    a :: Int#
    a = a

don't typecheck, though I cant say I understand the ins and outs of the latter.