The notion of text is perhaps the most used and discussed within social and human sciences. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly one of the worst defined. Philology and Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Semiotics: all these disciplines refer in various ways to the "text", to make of it the basic object of their analysis or to measure the distance they keep from it. So what does "text" mean? What genealogy does this concept have? Why is there "no salvation outside the text"? This book shows why the text should be the formal model to explain all human, social, cultural and historic phenomena and, as a consequence, the product of a double invention: first as a sociocultural configuration, secondly as an analytical reconstruction.