In 1976 Editions Gallimard published what has subsequently, in retrospect, been praised as one of Baudrillard's most significant works. Mike Gane, who wrote an introduction to the English edition, saw it as ‘without doubt Jean Baudrillard's most important book’. L'Echange Symbolique et Mort was not published in full in English translation until 1993 by which time Baudrillard had been labelled, misleadingly, as a ‘postmodernist’ for at least a decade. The book, read as a whole, categorically gives the lie to such allegations. The extract here is from Sage's 1993 publication translated by Ian Hamilton Grant as Symbolic Exchange and Death. By the time of the French publication in the mid 1970s Baudrillard had also published two more books much influenced by debates around Marxism. Pour Une Critique de l'Economie Politique du Signe came out with Gallimard in 1970 and Le Miroir de la Production was published by Casterman in 1973. For many years in the English-speaking world it was the Marxist influenced books which tended to be discussed rather than the text which concentrated on developing the twin ideas of symbolic exchange and simulation, both so central to all of Baudrillard's work for the next thirty years. The book when first published in 1976 appeared in Gallimard's Bibliothèque des Sciences Humaines which included books by fellow French theorists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. Within a year Baudrillard had published Oublier Foucault ('Forget Foucault’ in English) which caused a considerable personal rift with Foucault and to some extent increased Baudrillard's outsider stance in the French academy.