The controversy over structuralism reached its peak around 1966–7, when a new generation of French theorists, including Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, came onto the intellectual scene. Inspired by Marxism and psychoanalysis, these intellectuals are today known for their critical epistemologies that point to the symbolic constitution of the subject and insist on the constitutive role of language in society. Yet while these theorists have been greeted as representatives of the linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities, the linguistic and semiotic traditions themselves, which have so decisively stimulated the imagination of the interdisciplinary theoretical debate, are hardly known outside a rather restricted circle of specialists. Not surprisingly, these thinkers have often been perceived as sweeping theorists of language in society, but of rather limited help when it comes to analyzing linguistic and semiotic texts.