I've seen it done years ago in a few circuits. It involved biasing the input pin with a DC voltage and AC coupling a signal input via a capacitor. Seemed to give 20-40db gain as I recall, but not very stable, pretty temp and circuit sensitive. Not a viable option over the zillion of great op amps available.
If you look at many of the crystal oscillator circuits that use a logic gate as a gain stage they essential do the same thing to get the circuit to start and oscillate, however it's certainly not linear once reaching full stable output.
Lefty