This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux’s materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings ‘always-already-there’ instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux’s consequential work in respect of Ferdinand de Saussure’s epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning. Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, John Searle’s philosophy of language, B. F. Skinner’s indwelling agents, J. L. Austin’s...