This Reader will be of interest to students and staff in the human and social sciences in a range of university courses across the globe and to those general readers interested in contemporary public intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard and to some extent those he specifically selected as influential and important such as Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Paul Virilio. It is modelled on the author's already published Reader on Paul Virilio, Baudrillard's long-time friend and compatriot (Redhead 2004b). Virilio is still, after all these years, the closest theorist to Jean Baudrillard, personally and politically, symbolised in all sorts of connections. For instance, a photograph from Jean Baudrillard's extensive portfolio adorns the front cover of Paul Virilio's book of interviews on the ‘accident of art’ (Lotringer and Virilio 2005). However, as this book demonstrates, there should be no confusion between the two of them. Baudrillard and Virilio should always be seen as separate. A couple of years before he died (MacFarquhar 2005) Baudrillard insisted ‘what I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself’. Jean Baudrillard, the simulacrum, is certainly a singular object. As Baudrillard has emphatically stated in discussion, ‘you must create your underground because now there's no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black hole, your own singularity’.