Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780823249688)

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.

Author: Maurizio Ferraris
ISBN-10: 0823249689
ISBN-13: 9780823249688
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/18/2012
Pages: 392
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d