By the end of the century Baudrillard had started to produce a familiar aphoristic, poetic writing style across the board, not just in his Cool Memories diaries. He had after all started in the field of literature in the 1950s and 1960s and published a book of poems called L'Ange de Stuc (‘Stucco Angel’ in English) in 1978. In 1999 Editions Galilée published L'Echange Impossible which comprised discourses on his own novel terms like ‘radicality of thought’, ‘radical uncertainty’ and ‘impossible exchange’ but which had no footnotes or referencing system at all. It is theory, but not as we know it. For the remainder of his life Baudrillard wrote everything in this ‘theory-fiction’ style. In 2001 Verso published Impossible Exchange with an English translation and added footnotes by Chris Turner. The extract here is from the beginning of the book and is a development of the implications of Baudrillard's term ‘impossible exchange’. The influence of Georges Bataille (the idea of the accursed share and general economy) and Marcel Mauss (the notion of gift-exchange) was always already present throughout most of Baudrillard's writing and it is evident here, too. Baudrillard's anthropology opens itself up to criticisms of him as nostalgic for a long gone primitive society. Yet among Baudrillard's influences in the 1960s were the likes of the semiotician Roland Barthes, not conservative, traditional anthropologists. In fact Baudrillard always wanted to go beyond classical, Marxist or structuralist anthropology to produce a new, radical anthropology of modernity.