 The Mirror of Production and his next book Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), a major text finally translated in 1993, are attempts to provide ultraradical perspectives that overcome the limitations of an economistic Marxist tradition that privileges the economic sphere. This ultra-leftist phase of Baudrillard’s itinerary would be short-lived, however, though in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard produces one of his most important and dramatic provocations. The text opens with a Preface that condenses his attempt to provide a significantly different approach to society and culture. Building on the French cultural theory of Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss, and Alfred Jarry, he champions “symbolic exchange” which resists capitalist values of utility and monetary profit for cultural values. Baudrillard argues that in Bataille’s claim that expenditure and excess is connected with sovereignty, Mauss’s descriptions of the social prestige of gift-giving in premodern society, Jarry’s theater that ridicules French culture, and Saussure’s anagrams, there is a break with the values of capitalist exchange and production, or the production of meaning in linguistic exchange. These cases of “symbolic exchange,” Baudrillard believes, break with the values of production and describe poetic exchange and creative cultural activity that provides alternatives to the capitalist values of production and exchange.