Derrida: Monumental or Documental?

This paper explores Maurizio Ferraris’s philosophical dialogue with Jacques Derrida, tracing the evolution from deconstruction to documentality and the emergence of a realist ontology suited for the digital age. While acknowledging Derrida’s influence, Ferraris distances himself from postmodernism’s obsession with overcoming metaphysics, proposing instead that social reality is grounded not in collective intentionality but in recording, summarized by the formula Object = Recorded Act. Through the concept of documentality, Ferraris reconceives Derrida’s dictum ‘there is nothing outside the text’ as ‘nothing social exists outside the text’. The paper situates this theory within the rise of digital technologies and big data, arguing that the proliferation of documentation has transformed the social world into a vast network of recorded behaviours. Ferraris identifies this transformation as both the foundation of contemporary capitalism – producing what he calls ‘documedia surplus value’ – and the key to its political reform. He thus advocates for ‘digital communism’ and Webfare, systems that redistribute the immense value generated by users’ online data. Finally, Ferraris expands his theory into a technosophy, conceiving human intelligence as both embodied and technologically equipped. The result is a constructive, political, and realist reappropriation of Derrida’s legacy for the age of artificial intelligence.