The term semiotics today calls to mind a tradition rather than a homogeneous body of doctrine. The period of the Stoics, the Middle Ages with its modi significandi, the eighteenth century with Locke, Leibniz, Condillac and the Ideologists, and family the beginning of the twentieth and then entered Saussurian and, later, Hjelmslevian and structural linguistics – these are the great moments of that semiotic activity which marks our Western episteme from its Greek beginnings to its positive apotheosis. Yet it is clear that if this semiotic activity has always been present in the organization of our knowledge, it is only very recently, within no more than the last few years, that it has emerged once more into the scientific and even ideological consciousness, taking its place in this resurgence amongst those events that characterize radically modern thought. How is this emergence today of semiotics to be explained? To try to answer that question is, in fact, to try to answer a quest...