Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces

This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription-the leaving of a trace to be called up later-is what is most fundamental to them. In doing so, it systematically organizes concepts and theories that Ferraris’s

predecessors-most notably Derrida, in his project of a positive grammatology-left in an impressionistic state.

Ferraris begins by redefining ontology as a way of cataloguing the world. Before any epistemology can discuss the validity of scientific or nonscientific judgments, one faces a collection of objects, be they natural, ideal, or social. Among these, Ferraris focuses on social objects, elaborating a theory of experience in the social world that leads him to define social objects as inscribed acts. He then uses this notion to interpret social phenomena, also in light of a systematic discussion of the concept of performatives, from Austin to Derrida and Searle.

Moving into considerations of the present technological revolution, Ferraris develops a symptomatology of the document that leads to a consideration of legal systems, finding in them original applications for his theory that an object equals a written act.

Written in an easy, often witty style, Documentality revises Foucault’s late concept of the ontology of actuality into the project of an ontological laboratory, thereby reinventing philosophy as a pragmatic activity that is directly applicable to our everyday life.