Baudrillard is introduced as a theorist whose work has frequently been misread. It is suggested that when sufficient attention is paid to his oblique and literary style we can find his work to have parallels with thinkers in the radical Durkheimian tradition, such as Mauss and Bataille, as well as to an almost poetic transformation of the situation diagnosed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Although such work differs considerably from that of Derrida, both are found to share a commitment to the championing of a certain singularity. This is seen to give rise to Derrida's "a politics' which challenges the reductions of political theory in the name of that which resists it and to which it cannot but must do justice. Baudrillard's transpolitics is similarly a reaction to the failures of politics and the political in relation to singularity.