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The paper focuses on the relations between Ferraris’ notion of documentality and the traditional notions of causality, intentionality, and normativity. I show that the notion of documentality, whose core is the concept of trace, rests upon an account of causality such as those documents are constituted by causal chains. That being the case, we need some criterion in order to differentiate documental chains from others kinds of causal chains. I argue that by tracing intentionality back to documentality Ferraris prevents his theory from using intentionality as a criterion of this sort. Yet, without such a criterion, the documentality theory risks going back to Derrida’s claim according to which nothing exists outside the text. The final part of the paper considers two strategies that can allow the documentality theory to avoid this risk.