The twentieth century witnessed the most daring adventures and gambles in the language-world. The human disciplines were impacted by the paradigmatic promotion of a structural linguistics with definitive effects on research methods and practices. Subsequently, the critical propositions on signs - in the philosophies of difference or "post-structuralisms" - translated into an irradiation of multiple semiotics and deterritorializations of meaning. How was it possible to adapt, in the structuralist interpretations of social life, a model proper to linguistics, which lacked unity of use among theories and disciplines, besides presenting inadequacies by virtue of its symbolic nature, alien to the use of the usual empirical, phenomenological or dialectical methods? In what ways did the philosophies of difference react to the predominance of structuralism, how did they challenge its system discourses and the hegemony of the signifying regime, and how did they disarticulate its theoretical and methodological assumptions to claim a divergent thought, whose deconstructive effects resonate in contemporary analyses of the social body?