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History of Sardinia

Archaeological evidence of prehistoric human settlement on the island of Sardinia is present in the form of nuraghes and other prehistoric monuments, which dot the land. The recorded history of Sardinia begins with its contacts with the various people who sought to dominate western Mediterranean trade in classical antiquity: Phoenicians, Punics and Romans. Initially under the political and economic alliance with the Phoenician cities, it was partly conquered by Carthage in the late 6th century BC and then entirely by Rome after the First Punic War (230 BC). The island was included for centuries in the Roman province of Sardinia and Corsica, which would be incorporated into the diocese of Italia suburbicaria in 3rd and 7th centuries.

In the Early Middle Ages, through the European barbarian movements, the waning of the Byzantine Empire influence in the western Mediterranean and the Saracen raids, the island fell out of the sphere of influence of any higher government; this led to the birth of four independent kingdoms called Judicates (Latin: Judicati; Sardinian: Judicados) in the 8th through 10th centuries. Falling under papal influence, Sardinia became the focus of the rivalry of Genoa, Pisa, and the Crown of Aragon, which eventually subsumed the island as the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1324. The Iberian Kingdom was to last until 1718, when it was ceded to the House of Savoy; from Piedmont, the Savoyards pursued a policy of expansion to the rest of the Italian peninsula, having their Kingdom of Sardinia be later renamed into "Kingdom of Italy" in 1861.

Prehistory
The oldest trace in Sardinia of the anthropomorphic prehistoric primate called Oreopithecus bambolii is dated to 8.5 million years ago. In 1996 a hominid finger bone, dated up to 250.000 BC, was found in a cave in the Logudoro region.

Modern humans appeared in the island during the Upper Paleolithic, a phalanx dated to 18000 BC had been found in the Corbeddu cave, near Oliena. Mesolithic human remains had been discovered at Su Coloru cave of Laerru but also in the south (Sirri, Arbus).

Already in the Stone Age, Monte Arci played an important role. The old volcano was one of the central places where obsidian was found and worked for cutting tools and arrowheads. Even now the volcanic glass can be found on the sides of the mountain.

The Neolithic began in Sardinia in the 6th millennium BC with the Cardial culture. Later, important cultures like the Ozieri culture and the Arzachena culture of the late Neolithic and the Abealzu-Filigosa and Monte Claro culture of the Chalcolithic period, developed in the island contemporaneously with the appearance of the megalithic phenomenon.

The dolmens culture, around the end of the 3rd millennium BC, passed with other typical material aspects of Western Europe (e.g. Bell Beaker) through by the Sardinian coast even in Sicily.

Prehistoric and Pre-nuragic monuments and constructions that characterise the Sardinian landscapes are the Domus de Janas (House of the Fairies, House of the Witches), the menhir and Statue menhir and the dolmens.

Chronology of Pre-Nuragic Sardinia
Archeological cultures of Sardinia in the pre-Nuragic period:

Nuragic period

Bronze Age Sardinia is characterised by stone structures called nuraghes, of which there are more than 8,000. The most famous is the complex of Barumini in the province of Medio Campidano. The nuraghes were mainly built in the period from about 1800 to 1200 BC, though many were used until the Roman period. Characteristics of this period are also the holy well temples (for example Santa Cristina, Paulilatino), the megara temples and the Giants' graves.

The Nuragic Sards also produced a vast collection of bronze statuettes and the so-called giants of Mont'e Prama, which might constitute the first anthropomorphic statues of Europe.

It is known that the Sardinians had contact with the Myceneans, who traded with the western Mediterranean. Contact with powerful cities of Crete, such as Kydonia, is clear from pottery recovered in archaeological excavations in Sardinia. The alleged connection with the Sherden, one of the sea peoples who invaded Egypt and other areas of eastern Mediterranean, has been supported by scholars like the professor Giovanni Ugas from the University of Cagliari;  this hypothesis has been however opposed by other archaeologists and historians.

The name of the island could result from Sardus (known amongst the Romans as Sardus Pater), a mythological hero of the Nuragic pantheon.

Phoenician settlement
From the 8th century BC, Phoenicians founded several cities and strongholds on strategic points in the south and west of Sardinia, often peninsulas or islands near estuaries, easy to defend and natural harbours, such as Tharros, Bithia, Sulci, Nora and Caralis (Cagliari). The majority of the inhabitants in these cities were of indigenous nuragic stock while the Phoenician element was, although culturally predominant, in minority. The Phoenicians came originally from what is now Lebanon and founded a vast trading network in the Mediterranean. Sardinia had a special position because it was central in the Western Mediterranean between Carthage, Spain, the river Rhône and the Etruscan civilization area. The mining area of the Iglesiente was important for the metals lead and zinc. After the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians took over control in this part of the Mediterranean, around 510 BC, after which a first attempt of conquest of the island in 540 BC ended in failure. They expanded their influence to the western and southern coast from Bosa to Caralis, consolidating the existing Phoenician colonies, administered by plenipotentiaries called Suffetes, and founding new ones such as Olbia, Cornus and Neapolis; Tharros probably became the capital of the province. Carthage stressed the growing of grain and cereals and prohibited fruit trees.

Tharros, Nora, Bithia, Monte Sirai etc. are now important archaeological monuments where architecture and city planning can be studied.

Roman Empire
In 240 BC, in the course of the First Punic War, the Carthaginian mercenaries on the island revolted and gave the Romans, who some years earlier had defeated the Carthaginians in the naval battle of Sulci, the opportunity to land on Sardinia and occupy it. In 238 BC the Romans took over the whole island, without meeting any resistance. They took over an existing developed infrastructure and urbanized culture (at least in the plains). Along with Corsica it formed the province of Corsica et Sardinia, under a praetor. Together with Sicily it formed one of the main granaries of Rome until the Romans conquered Egypt in the 1st century BC.

A revolt, led by two Sardo-Punic notables from Cornus and Tharros, Hampsicora and Hanno, broke out after the crushing Roman defeat at Cannae (216 BC). A Roman army of 22,000 infantrymen and 1,200 cavalry, under Titus Manlius Torquatus, reached Sardinia landing in Caralis and defeating Hiostus, the son of Hampsicora, near Milis. The Romans then met the Carthaginian-Sardinian allied forces in the south of the island, defeating them in a pitched battle that took place between Sestu and Decimomannu, and killing 12,000 men. Another major revolt took place in 177-176 BC when the Balares and the Ilienses were defeated by Tiberius Gracchus, who, according to Livy, killed or enslaved about 80,000 natives. The last organized revolts were repressed by Marcus Caecilius Metellus in 115-111 BC and Titus Albucius in 106. However the Sardinians living in the impervious mountains of the interior resisted the Roman colonization well into Imperial times.

Punic culture remained strong during the first centuries of the Roman domination. However, in the long run, Romanization prevailed, and Latin became the speech of the majority of the inhabitants, ultimately developing into the modern Sardinian language. The Roman religion began to spread among Sardinians as well. Caralis, the provincial capital, Nora and Sulci obtained the status of Municipium within the 1st century AD and a Roman colony named Turris Libissonis (Porto Torres) was founded in the north-west while the village of Usellus become perphans a Roman colony under Trajan. Four great roads were built: two along the coasts and two in the interior connecting all the major cities.

During the Roman period, the geographer Ptolemy noted that Sardinia was inhabited by the following tribes, from north to south: the Tibulati and the Corsi, the Coracenses, the Carenses and the Cunusitani, the Salcitani and the Lucuidonenses, the Æsaronenses, the Æchilenenses (also called Cornenses), the Rucensi, the Celsitani and the Corpicenses, the Scapitani and the Siculensi, the Neapolitani and the Valentini, the Solcitani and the Noritani.

In the year 212 AD, every inhabitant of the empire became a Roman citizen by the Constitutio Antoniniana, better known as the "Edict of Caracalla". At that time, many islanders from the Municipia and Coloniae were Roman citizens, while those living in the interior were not. Around the year 286 AD, Sardinia was incorporated into the Italian diocese during the empire of Diocletianus, and in 324 AD, under the rule of the emperor Constantine the Great, in the suburbicaria Italian diocese, until the conquest by the Vandals in 456 AD.

Vandals, Goths and Byzantines
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Sardinia was subject to several conquests. In 456, the Vandals, an East Germanic tribe, coming from North Africa, occupied the coastal cities of the island; they imposed garrisons guarded by African auxiliaries, like the Mauri. The Vandals followed Arianism and deported a number of African Bishops in the island such as Fulgentius of Ruspe. In 533, Sardinia rebelled under the Vandal governor Godas, a Goth, who proclaimed himself rex of Sardinia, asking the Byzantines for aid. In the summer of 533 Vandal forces (5,000 men and 120 ships), led by Tzazo, arrived in Sardinia to stifle Godas' rebellion and conquered Caralis, killing Godas and his followers. In early 534, the Vandals of Sardinia surrendered immediately to the Byzantines when faced with news of the Vandal collapse in Africa; thenceforth the island was part of the Byzantine Empire, included as a province in the Praetorian prefecture of Africa. The local governor sat in Caralis. During the Gothic Wars, much of the island fell easily to the Ostrogoths, but the final fall of the Germanic resistance in mainland Italy reassured Byzantine control. Sardinia was subsequently included in the Exarchate of Africa until its end by the Arabs in 698 AD, when the island was likely aggregated to the Exarchate of Ravenna. In 599 and during the 7th century, the Longobard fleet tried to attack Caralis and Turris Libissonis (Porto Torres), but in vain.

One of the few ethnic Sardinians known from this period was Ospitone, a leader of the Barbaricinos (people of Barbagia). According to the Pope Gregory I's letters, a Romanized and Christianized area existed on the island (that of the provinciales) that co-existed with, in the interior, pagan or semi-pagan cultures (Gens Barbaricina). The ruler of one of the latter, Ospitone, converted to Christianity in 594 after a diplomatic exchange. Christianization however remained long influenced by eastern and Byzantine culture. Other known religious figures of Sardinian origin of that period (5th–6th centuries) are Pope Hilarius and Pope Symmachus.

Saracen raids
Starting from 705 to 706, the Saracens from North Africa (recently conquered by the Arab armies) harassed the population of the coastal cities. Details about the political situation of Sardinia in the following centuries are scarce. Due to Saracen attacks, in the 9th century Tharros was abandoned in favor of Oristano, after more than 1.800 years of human occupation while Caralis was abandoned in favor of Santa Igia; numerous other coastal centres suffered the same fate (Nora, Sulci, Bithia, Cornus, Bosa, Olbia etc.). There was news of another massive Saracen sea attack in 1015−16 from Balearics, led by Mujāhid al-ʿĀmirī (Latinized as Museto), the Saracens' attempt of invasion of the island was stopped by Sardinian Judicates with the support of the Fleets of the Maritime Republics of Pisa and Genoa, called by Pope Benedict VIII.

Judicates (Judicados)
From the mid-11th century the Judicates ("held by judges") appeared. The title of Judex (judge, judike in medieval Sardinian) was an heir of that of the Byzantine governor after the creation of the Exarchate of Africa in 582 (Prases or Judex Provinciae). In the 8th and 9th centuries the four partes depending from Caralis grew increasingly independent, after that Byzantium was totally cut off from the Tyrrhenian Sea by the Muslim conquest of Sicily in 827. A letter from Pope Nicholas I in 864 mentions for the first time the Sardinian judges, and their autonomy is clear in a later letter by Pope John VIII, which defined them as "Princes". A letter by Mieszko I to Pope John XV proves that the Judicates were known even in Poland, and that they played a prestigious role in Medieval Europe.

During the judicial era Sardinia had some 300.000 inhabitants, of which slightly more than 1/3 were free. These were subjected to the authority of local curators (administrators), in turn subjected to the judge (who also administered justice and was the commander of the army). The church was also powerful, and at this time it had completely abandoned the Eastern Rite. The late 11th-century arrival of Benedictine, Camaldolese and other monks from the Italian Mezzogiorno, Lombardy and Provence, especially the monasteries of Montecassino, Saint-Victor de Marseille and Vallombrosa, boosted the agriculture in a land which was extremely underdeveloped. The condaghes (catalogues, cartularies) of the monasteries, which record property transactions, are an important source for the study of the island and its language in the 11th and 12th centuries. Evidence from the condaghes of San Pietro di Silki, in Sassari, and Santa Maria di Bonarcado concerning the children of slaves has been adduced to show that differences in agricultural lifestyles between regions may affect the survival rate of females, hypothetically through increased infanticide of baby girls. The abbacy of Santa Maria di Bonarcado contained more central, upland regions where a pastoral economy dominated and women were less economically useful; among children in that region, sex ratios are highly skewed in favour of men. On the other hand, in the region of San Pietro di Silki, less pastoral, child sex ratios are not skewed abnormally.

There were four (historically known) Judicates: Logudoro (or Torres), Cagliari (or Pluminos), Arborea and Gallura. Cagliari and Arborea and Logudoro (and perhaps Gallura) were united for a time in the 11th century. The initiatives of the Gregorian reformers led to greater contact between Sardinia and the Italian peninsula, especially through the desires of the judges to establish monasteries with monks from continental monasteries at Montecassino and Marseille. By the 12th century, the Sardinian Judicates, though obscure, are visible through the mists of time. They professed allegiance to the Holy See, which put them under the authority of the Archdiocese of Pisa, superseding the ancient primacy of the Archdiocese of Cagliari on the island.

Often quarreling between one another, the Judicates made a great number of commercial concessions to the Pisans and the Genoese. The Repubbliche Marinare soon became the true masters of the Sardinian economy.

In the late 12th and early 13th centuries, all four Judicates passed to foreign dynasties and the local families were relegated to minor positions. Arborea passed to the Catalan House of Cervera (Cervera-Bas) in 1185, though this was contested for the next few decades. In 1188, Cagliari was conquered by the House of Massa from the Republic of Pisa. Gallura became by marriage – it had been inherited by a woman, Elena – a possession of the House of Visconti, another Pisan family, in 1207. Only Logudoro survived to the end under local Sardinian rulers. However, its end was early. It passed to Genoa and to the Doria and Malaspina families in 1259 after the death of its last judge, Adelasia. Only a year before the others Judicates and the Pisans besieged Santa Igia and deposed the last ruler of Cagliari William III. Gallura survived longer, but the enemies of the Visconti in Pisa soon removed the last judge, Nino, a friend of Dante Alighieri, in 1288.

About the same time, Sassari declared itself a free commune allied to Genoa. In the early 14th century, much of Eastern and Southern Sardinia, including Castel di Castro (Cagliari), was under the authority of Pisa and of the della Gherardesca family, who founded the important mining town of Villa di Chiesa (now Iglesias). Arborea, however, survived as the only indigenous kingdom until 1420. One of the most remarkable Sardinian figure of the Middle Ages, Eleanor of Arborea, was co-ruler of that region in the late 14th century; she laid the foundations for the laws that remained valid until 1827, the Carta de Logu.

Kingdom of Sardinia in the Crown of Aragon and in the Spanish Empire

In 1323 an Aragonese army, under Alfonso, son of King James II, disembarked near Palma di Sulcis, in Southern Sardinia. After the fall of Villa di Chiesa the Pisans were defeated again, both by land and sea, at Lucocisterna and in the gulf of Cagliari, and were forced to leave the island, maintaining only Castel di Castro until 1326. The Cagliari area as well as Gallura thus became part of the first nucleus of the Kingdom of Sardinia, established nominally by Pope Boniface VIII in 1297, that was included in the Crown of Aragon.

In 1353 Marianus IV of Arborea, allied with the Doria family, waged war against the Aragonese, occupying much of the island but unable to capture Cagliari. The Peace of Sanluri (1355) ushered in a period of tranquility, but hostilities were resumed in 1365, with Arborea, led by Marianus IV and then, from 1391, by Brancaleone Doria, initially able to capture much of the Island. However, in 1409 the Aragonese crushed a Genoese fleet coming in support the Sardinians, and destroyed the Judicial army at the Battle of Sanluri. Oristano, the Arborean capital, fell on 29 March 1410. William II of Narbonne, the last Judge of Arborea, sold his remaining territories to the Aragonese in 1420, in exchange for 100,000 gold florins. The loss of the independence, the firm Aragonese (later Spanish from 1479) rule, with the introduction of a sterile feudalism, as well as the discovery of the Americas, provoked an unstoppable decline of Sardinia. In the 1470s an important revolt against the Aragonese was led by Leonardo Alagon, marquess of Oristano, who managed to defeat the viceroyal army but was later crushed at the Battle of Macomer (1478), ending any further hope of independence for the island. The unceasing attacks from North African pirates and a series of plagues (from 1582, 1652 and 1655) further worsened the situation.

In 1527, during the Franco-Spanish War, a French army of 4000 men led by the Italian Renzo da Ceri attacked the north of the island, besieging Castellaragonese and sacking Sorso and then Sassari for almost a month.

In 1566 the first typography of Sardinia was established in Cagliari, while in 1607 and 1617 were founded the University of Cagliari and the University of Sassari.

In the late 15th and in the early 16th century the Spaniards built watchtowers all along the coast (today called "Spanish towers") to protect the island against Ottoman incursions. In 1637 a French fleet led by Henri, Count of Harcourt sacked Oristano for about a week.

Kingdom of Sardinia under the House of Savoy
Sardinia was disputed between 1700 and 1720. After the War of the Spanish Succession it was assigned to Emperor Charles VI in 1714, Philip V of Spain briefly recovered the island in 1717, but in 1720 the European powers assigned Sicily to Charles VI and Sardinia to the House of Savoy, so Vittorio Amedeo II became the King of Sardinia. In 1793 Sardinians twice defeated the French invaders (French expedition to Sardinia). On 23 February 1793, Domenico Millelire, in command of the Sardinian fleet, defeated near the Maddalena archipelago the fleets of the French Republic, which included with the rank of lieutenant, the young and future Emperor of France Napoleon Bonaparte. Millelire received the first Gold Medal of Military Valor of the Italian Navy. In the same month, Sardinians stopped the attempted French landing on the beach of Quartu Sant'Elena, near the Capital of Cagliari. Because of these successes, the representatives of nobility and clergy (Stamenti) formulated five requests addressed to the King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia in order to have the same rights as the Italian mainlanders, but they met with a refusal. Because of this discontent, on 28 April 1794, during an uprising in Cagliari, two Piedmontese officials were killed. That was the start of a revolt (called the "Moti rivoluzionari sardi" or "Vespri sardi") all over the island, which culminated on 28 April 1794 (commemorated today as sa die de sa Sardigna) with the expulsion of the officers for a few days from the capital Cagliari. On 28 December 1795, insurgents in Sassari demonstrating against feudalism, mainly from the region of Logudoro, occupied the city. On 13 February 1796, in order to prevent the spread of the revolt, the viceroy Filippo Vivalda gave to the Sardinian magistrate Giovanni Maria Angioy the role of Alternos, which meant a substitute of the viceroy himself. Angioy moved from Cagliari to Sassari, and during his journey almost all the villages joined the uprising, demanding an end to feudalism and aiming to declare the island to be an independent republic, but once he was outnumbered by loyalist forces he fled to Paris and sought support from the French to invade Sardinia and make it an independent Republic.

In 1799 King Charles Emmanuel IV was ousted from Piedmont by the French army, and moved his court to Cagliari (his brother and successor Victor Emmanuel I returned to Turin only in 1814). At the end of the 18th century, the Universities of Sassari and Cagliari were restored. In 1820, the Savoyards imposed the "Enclosures Act" (editto delle chiudende) on the island, a legislative act which turned the land's traditional collective ownership, a cultural and economic cornerstone of Sardinia since the Nuragic times, into private property. This gave rise to many abuses, as the reform favoured the landholders while excluding the poor Sardinian farmers and shepherds, who witnessed the abolition of the communal rights and the sale of the land. Many local rebellions like the Nuorese Su Connottu ("The Already Known" in Sardinian) riot in 1868, all repressed by the King's army, resulted in an attempt to return to the past and reaffirm the right to use the once common land.

In 1847, under King Charles Albert, all the administrative differences between Sardinia and the Italian mainland were abolished through the so-called Perfect fusion: this manoveur had been presented as the only possible way to grant equal rights to all inhabitants of the Kingdom, which would become a unitary state and the basic legislation of the future united Italy as well.

New urban plans and new villages (for example Carloforte, Calasetta and Santa Teresa di Gallura) were realised between the 18th and the 19th centuries. They often followed the urban model of Turin, which now was the capital of the Reign of Italy. New infrastructures were built under King Carlo Felice. The main road from the south (Cagliari) to the north (Sassari) was enhanced (the road still exists today and it still bears the name of Carlo Felice). Also, the first ferry route between the island and Genoa was established, using steamboats such as the Gulnara. The first railway was inaugurated in 1871. By the end of the 19th century the Royal Railways had received 30 locomotives, 106 passenger cars, and 436 cargo cars.

The economy was focused mainly on the primary sector (agriculture and sheep husbandry) and on mining. The majority of mining societies operating in Sardinia depended on non-Sardinian capital money. However, in 1848 the Sardinian entrepreneur Giovanni Antonio Sanna achieved the property of the mine of Montevecchio, thus becoming the 3rd richest man of the Kingdom.

Kingdom of Italy
Most Sardinian forests were cut down at this time, in order to provide the Piedmontese with raw materials, like wood, used to make railway sleepers on the mainland. The extension of primary natural forests, praised by every traveller visiting Sardinia, would in fact be reduced to little more than 100,000 hectares at the end of the century.

With the Unification of Italy in 1861, the Kingdom of Sardinia became the Kingdom of Italy. Since 1855 the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi bought most of the island of Caprera in the Maddalena archipelago, where he moved because of the loss of his home town of Nice. His house, farm and tomb are now the most visited Sardinian museum (Compendio Garibaldino).

In 1883 the first train travelled between Cagliari and Sassari, and in these decades were made all the modern public works: roads, dams, schools, sewers and aqueducts, mainly in the cities.

During the First World War the Sardinian soldiers of the Brigata Sassari distinguished themselves, with several being decorated with gold medals and other honours. Following the war, in occasion of Irish independence the ex-combatants organized themselves into a Sardinian nationalist movement, the Sardinian Action Party, but was eventually outlawed in 1926. In 1924, the Italian Parliament led by Benito Mussolini passed a bill (called la legge del miliardo) to establish a budget of one billion lire to develop infrastructure in order to encourage economic development. However, only a portion of the designated funds were ever distributed, and mainly in Cagliari.

The writer Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.

During the Fascist period, with the implementation of the policy of autarky, several swamps around the island were drained and new agrarian communities founded. The main communities were in the area of Oristano, where the village of Mussolinia (now called Arborea), populated by people from Veneto and Friuli, was located, and in the area adjacent the city of Alghero, within the region of Nurra, where Fertilia was built, settled, after the World War II, by Istrians and Dalmatians from Yugoslavia. Also established during that time was the city of Carbonia, which became the main centre of mining activity. Works to drain the numerous waste lands and the growth of mining activities favoured the arrival of numerous settlers and immigrants from the Mainland.

The repression by the Fascist regime of its opponents within the region was ruthless. Rural Sardinia showed little interest in the Fascist state, while the urban bourgeoisie from the cities, some of which being repopulated by Italian mainlanders, were its staunchest supporters on the island. Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of Italian Communist Party, was arrested and died in prison. The anarchist Michele Schirru was executed after a failed assassination plot against Benito Mussolini.

During World War II Sardinia was a theatre of bombing; from 1940 the Axis used its airfields for attacks across the Mediterranean, while from 1943 the island was under air attack from the Allies and the cities of Cagliari and Alghero were heavily bombed. (Air raids had also been conducted by an aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy in September 1940, shortly after Italy's entry into the war.) German troops were stationed on Sardinia and Corsica – occupied by the Italians – in 1943. By that July, most airbases in Sardinia had been rendered inoperable by Allied aerial bombing. A number of diversionary raids on Sardinia, Operation Hawthorn, were carried out by the Allies in summer 1943 to distract Axis attention from the upcoming invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky. Operation Mincemeat was an elaborate diversion implemented by the Allies to persuade the Axis's intelligence that their planned invasion of southern Europe would take place in the Balkans and Italy and would feature an invasion of Sardinia. This succeeded in diverting Axis troops from Sicily, the real target of the invasion. The war ended in Sardinia in September 1943, with the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht to Corsica following the surrender of Italy to the Allies under the Armistice of Cassibile, and the island, together with Southern Italy, became free. Allied forces landed on Sardinia on 14 September 1943 and the last German troops were expelled on the 18th.

Italian Republic and Sardinian autonomy

In 1946 more than 60% of Sardinians voted in favour of monarchy, just as much as in Southern Italy, but a few days later Italy became a Republic. In 1948 Sardinia obtained the status of autonomous region which, while being the highest degree of self-governance since the Judicates era, fell short of many Sardinians' expectations. The first regional elections were held on 8 May 1949. By 1951, malaria was successfully eliminated with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. In the same years the Italian economic miracle led to the birth of Sardinian tourist "boom", mainly focused on beach holidays and luxury tourism, such as in Costa Smeralda. Today about ten million people visit the island every year.

With the increase in tourism, coal decreased in importance. However, shortly after the Second World War a ponderous industrialization effort was commenced, the so-called "Piani di Rinascita" (Rebirth Plans), with the initiation of major infrastructure projects on the island. This included the realization of new dams and roads, reforestation, agricultural zones on reclaimed marsh land, and large industrial complexes (primarily oil refineries and related petrochemical operations). These efforts to create jobs have largely failed due to the high costs of transportation that could not compensate the cheap labor. In the 1950s and 1960s many Sardinians migrated to Northern and Central Italy (Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany and Rome) and the rest of Europe (mostly in Germany, France and Belgium) but also from the interior of the island to the coastal cities of Cagliari, Olbia and Sassari. In the early 1960s with the creation of petrochemical industries, thousands of ex-farmers became specialised workers, and some others would commence to work on the newly established military bases, created primarily for the NATO. Even now, around 60% of all Italian and US military installations in Italy are on Sardinia, whose area is less than one-tenth of all the Italian territory and whose population is little more than the 2,5%; furthermore, they comprise over 35.000 hectares used for experimental weapons testing, where 80% of the military explosives in Italy are used. Ever since, there has always been a local protest movement expressing deep concern over the environmental degradation the military activities would cause.

Nevertheless, since 1973 the international oil crisis caused the firing of thousands of workers employed in the petrochemical industry. Especially because of the failed industrialization plans, Sardinia is actually the most polluted region in Italy, with over 445,000 hectares of contaminated soil still to be remediated.

Among other factors, economic crisis and unemployment aggravated the crime rate, as evidenced by the increasing frequency of phenomena such as kidnappings and political subversion of the Anonima sarda: between the 1970s and the early 1980s, some communist and nationalist militant groups, the most famous being Barbagia Rossa and the Sardinian Armed Movement (MAS), claimed several terrorist attempts. In the span of just two years (1987–1988), 224 bombing attacks were reported.

In 1983, for the first time ever a militant of a nationalist party, the Sardinian Action Party (Partidu Sardu-Partito Sardo d'Azione), was elected president of the regional parliament. Nevertheless, in the 1980s a number of even more radical pro-independence movements were born, some even managing to evolve into parties in the 1990s. In 1999, after a long period of Italian assimilation policies in Sardinia, the languages indigenous to the island were eventually recognized as "historical language minorities" of the Country, and allowed to formally enjoy co-official status alongside Italian.

Also noticeable is the difference between coastal regions and the inland. Coastal regions have always been more open to outside influences. Nowadays Sardinia is most known for its coasts (La Maddalena, Costa Smeralda), the north-western coast near Sassari (Alghero, Stintino, Castelsardo) and Cagliari, because these are easily reachable by ship and by plane.

Today Sardinia is a phasing-in EU region, featured by a diversified economy, mainly focused on tourism and the tertiary. The economic efforts of last twenty years have reduced the supposed handicap of insularity, for example with low cost air companies and information and informatic technologies, thanks to the CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia). The CRS4 developed the first Italian website, and invented the webmail, in 1995, that brought to the birth of several telecommunication companies and internet service providers based on the island, such as Video On Line (1993), Tiscali (1998) and Andala UMTS (1999).

title: History of Sardinia


text:
Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (born Jackie Élie Derrida; 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".

During his career, Derrida published over 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, music, architecture, and political theory.

Into the 2000s, his work retained major academic influence throughout the United States, continental Europe, South America and all other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music (especially in the musical atmosphere of hauntology), art, and art criticism.

Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work. Others cite: Of Grammatology (1967) Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial.

Life
Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), Algeria, to Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (known as "Aimé") Derrida (1896–1970), who worked all his life for the wine and spirits company Tachet, including as a travelling salesman (his son reflected the job was "exhausting" and "humiliating", his father forced to be a "docile employee" to the extent of waking early to do the accounts at the dining-room table), and Georgette Sultana Esther (1901–1991), daughter of Moïse Safar. His family was Sephardic Jewish, (originally from Toledo) and became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. His parents named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid. He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name".

Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.

On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria—implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Camus and Sartre.

In the late 1940s, he attended the, in Algiers; in 1949 he moved to Paris, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne. At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. A professor of his, Jan Czarnecki, was a progressive Protestant who would become a signer of the Manifesto of the 121. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy () on Edmund Husserl (see below). He then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.

Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term hermeneutics of suspicion), and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, was connected to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

With "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate (doctorat d'État) by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title "L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture" ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing"). The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ("L'idéalité de l'objet littéraire"); his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.

Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor (directeur d'études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH; 'International college of philosophy'), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.

On 8 May 1985, Derrida was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Class IV – Humanities, Section 3 -Criticism and Philology.

In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007.

Derrida was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Silesia, the University of Coimbra, the University of Athens, and many others around the world. In 2001, he received the Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.

Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university".

Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida's Elsewhere) by Safaa Fathy (1999), and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).

Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002.

On 19 February 2003, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq impending, René Major moderated a debate entitled "Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" between Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, co-hosted by Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis and Le Monde Diplomatique. The debate discussed the relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion.

Derrida died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of 9 October 2004.

At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to University of Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."

Philosophy
Derrida referred to himself as a historian. He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture. By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.

With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism", Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from the conception of speech's relation to writing to the understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics".

Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ... means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."

Early works
Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. Gary Banham has said that the dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation." In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. ...this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."

Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.

The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida had a mixed relationship.

Phenomenology vs structuralism debate (1959)
In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a "phenomenology vs structuralism debate".

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience"; for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This original complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.

1967–1972
Derrida's interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology (initially submitted as a Doctorat de spécialité thesis under Maurice de Gandillac), and Writing and Difference.

On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerge: the Other as opposed to the Same "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other", beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"." Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud.

This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.

In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel. This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.

1973–1980
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).

Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.

Of Spirit (1987)
On 14 March 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference entitled "Heidegger: Open Questions", a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit", and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?" His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II). He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this Geflecht [braid]": "the question of the question", "the essence of technology", "the discourse of animality", and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order."

Of Spirit contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.

1990s: political and ethical themes
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a political and ethical "turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Some refer to The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

However, scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Robert Magliola, and Nicole Anderson have argued that the "turn" has been exaggerated. Some, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.

Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this.

Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.

Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.

Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."

At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.

The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)
Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, "Unique each time, the end of the world"), to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.

2002 film
In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle." Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.

Politics
Derrida engaged with a variety of political issues, movements, and debates throughout his career. In 1968, he participated in the May 68 protests in France and met frequently with Maurice Blanchot. However, he expressed concerns about the "cult of spontaneity" and anti-unionist euphoria that he observed. He also registered his objections to the Vietnam War in a lecture he gave in the United States. Derrida signed a petition against age of consent laws in 1977, and in 1981 he founded the French Jan Hus association to support dissident Czech intellectuals.

In 1981, Derrida was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government for leading a conference without authorization and charged with drug trafficking, although he claimed the drugs were planted on him. He was released with the help of the Mitterrand government and Michel Foucault. Derrida was an advocate for nuclear disarmament, protested against apartheid in South Africa, and met with Palestinian intellectuals during a visit to Jerusalem in 1988. He also opposed capital punishment and was involved in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Although Derrida was not associated with any political party until 1995, he supported the Socialist candidacy of Lionel Jospin, despite misgivings about such organizations. In the 2002 French presidential election, he refused to vote in the run-off election between far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen and center-right Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices. Derrida opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself within and beyond philosophy. He focused on understanding the political implications of notions such as responsibility, reason of state, decision, sovereignty, and democracy. By 2000, he was theorizing "democracy to come" and thinking about the limitations of existing democracies.

Influences on Derrida
Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV. In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks he'll find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).

Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Austin and Stéphane Mallarmé.

His book, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response. The use of deconstruction to read Jewish texts – like the Talmud – is relatively rare but has recently been attempted.

Peers and contemporaries
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, students and the heirs of Derrida's thought include Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Ernesto Laclau, Samuel Weber, Catherine Malabou, and Claudette Sartiliot.

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of a method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.

Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).

Paul de Man
Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.

Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.

Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.

Michel Foucault
Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on 4 March 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.

In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text." According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism. Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.

Derrida's translators
Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.

Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's Dissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.

Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from 12 December 2001 to 27 March 2002 and from 11 December 2002 to 26 March 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I (covering 8 December 1999 to 22 March 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).

With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."

Marshall McLuhan
Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium," of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."

He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. In a 1982 interview, he said:

"I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too."

And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said:

"As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and 'communication of consciousnesses.' We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism."

Architectural thinkers
Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of the khôra. Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion of khôra (χώρα) as set in the Timaeus (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri within the domain of phenomenology.

Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking khôra to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings. El-Bizri's reflections on "khôra" are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on dwelling and on being and space in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking), and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics. This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on "χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's khôra, Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that khôra rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida, khôra defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed".

Criticism from Marxists
In a paper entitled Ghostwriting, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx. Commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx, Terry Eagleton wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody."

Criticism from Anglophone philosophers
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in 1988, and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy". One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.

In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.

Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."

On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted."

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994).

Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.

Cambridge honorary doctorate
In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy Hugh Mellor. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and British institutions, including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists". The letter concluded that:

"... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university."

In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot; though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty. Hugh Mellor continued to find the award undeserved, explaining: "He is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad".

Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene". To answer a question about the "exceptional violence", the compulsive "ferocity", and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks", he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult that philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate"."If it were only a question of 'my' work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can't be limited to a personal 'oeuvre,' nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work. If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene. ... In short, to answer your question about the 'exceptional violence,' the compulsive 'ferocity,' and the 'exaggeration' of the 'attacks,' I would say that these critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate."

Dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB
Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".

In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)", which was published in the book Points....

Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.

Critical obituaries
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Independent. The magazine The Nation responded to the New York Times obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic". A second obituary by deconstruction scholar and Derrida's friend Mark C. Taylor was published by the Times a few days after the first one.

Major works

 * Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966), it was published in 1967 as Chapter 10 of Writing and Difference.
 * Of Grammatology (1967) Translated by Gayatri C. Spivak in 1976
 * Speech and Phenomena : And Other Essays on Husserl's of Sign (1967) Or, Voice and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology (1967)
 * Writing and Difference (1967) Trans. in 1978
 * Margins of Philosophy (1972)
 * Signature Event Context (1972)
 * Positions (1972)

Biographies

 * Peeters, Benoît (2012) Derrida: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity
 * Salmon, Peter (2020) An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida. London: Verso. ISBN 9781788732802

Introductory works

 * Adleman, Dan (2010) "Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory" (PDF)
 * Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics.
 * Culler, Jonathan (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
 * Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy.
 * Deutscher, Penelope (2006) How to Read Derrida (ISBN 978-0-393-32879-0).
 * Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh (2007) The Philosophy of Derrida, London: Acumen Press, 2006; Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
 * Goldschmit, Marc (2003) Jacques Derrida, une introduction Paris, Agora Pocket, ISBN 2-266-11574-X.
 * Hill, Leslie (2007) The Cambridge introduction to Jacques Derrida
 * Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language.
 * Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
 * Lentricchia, Frank (1980) After the New Criticism.
 * Moati Raoul (2009), Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire
 * Norris, Christopher (1987) Derrida (ISBN 0-674-19823-9).
 * Norris, Christopher (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
 * Thomas, Michael (2006) The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation.
 * Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.
 * Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.

Other works

 * Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205–19.
 * Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (ISBN 0-415-10967-1).
 * Bennington, Geoffrey, Legislations (ISBN 0-86091-668-5).
 * Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (ISBN 0-415-22427-6).
 * Critchley, Simon,
 * Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.
 * Coward, Harold G. (ed) Derrida and Negative theology, SUNY 1992. ISBN 0-7914-0964-3
 * Dal Bo, Federico Deconstructing the Talmud Routledge 2019. ISBN 978-1138208223
 * de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102–41.
 * El-Bizri, Nader, "Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus", Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), pp. 473–490.
 * El-Bizri, Nader, "ON KAI KHORA: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus," Studia Phaenomenologica 4 (2004), pp. 73–98.
 * Fabbri, Lorenzo. "Chronotopologies of the Exception. Agamben and Derrida before the Camps", "Diacritics", Volume 39, Number 3 (2009): 77–95.
 * Foucault, Michel, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550–74.
 * Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre, Derrida-Bergson. Sur l'immédiateté, Hermann, Paris, coll. "Hermann Philosophie", 2014. ISBN 9782705688318
 * Gasché, Rodolphe, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
 * Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror.
 * Goldschmit, Marc, Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006. ISBN 2-84938-058-X
 * Habermas, Jürgen, "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
 * Hägglund, Martin, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
 * Hamacher, Werner, Lingua amissa, Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila editores, 2012.
 * Kopić, Mario, Izazovi post-metafizike, Sremski Karlovci – Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica, 2007. (ISBN 978-86-7543-120-6)
 * Kopić, Mario, Nezacjeljiva rana svijeta, Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2007. (ISBN 978-953-249-035-0)
 * Mackey, Louis, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology," in Anglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3, July 1983. 255–272.
 * Llewelyn, John, Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, London: Macmillan, 1986.
 * Llewelyn, John, Appositions – of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
 * Llewelyn, John, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
 * Mackey, Louis, "A Nicer Knowledge of Belief" in Loius Mackey, An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature, Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219–240 (ISBN 978-0761822677).
 * Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN 0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
 * Magliola, Robert, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
 * Marder, Michael, The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN 0-8020-9892-4)
 * Miller, J. Hillis, For Derrida, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
 * Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida.
 * Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
 * Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida (ISBN 0-415-94269-1).
 * Rorty, Richard, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
 * Ross, Stephen David, Betraying Derrida, for Life, Atropos Press, 2013.
 * Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
 * Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida.
 * Salvioli, Marco, Il Tempo e le Parole. Ricoeur e Derrida a "margine" della fenomenologia, ESD, Bologna 2006.
 * Smith, James K. A., Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.
 * Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
 * Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN 0-521-62565-3).
 * Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
 * Zlomislic, Marko, Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics, Lexington Books, 2004.
 * Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
 * Zlomislic, Marko, Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics, Lexington Books, 2004.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Jacques Derrida


text:
Advogato

Advogato was an online community and social networking site dedicated to free software development and created by Raph Levien. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to archive.org.

History
Advogato described itself as "the free software developer's advocate." Advogato was an early pioneer of blogs, formerly known as "online diaries", and one of the earliest social networking websites. Advogato combined the most recent entries from each user's diary together into a single continuous feed called the recentlog, directly inspiring the creation of the Planet aggregator somewhat later.

Several high-profile members of the free software and open source software movements were users of the site, including Richard M. Stallman, Eric Raymond, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, and Jamie Zawinski.

Because Advogato was the first website to use a robust, attack-resistant trust metric and to release the underlying code for that trust mechanism under a free software license, it has been the basis of numerous research papers on trust metrics and social networking (see the list below for specific examples). Advogato's early adoption of an XML-RPC interface led to its use as an example of how such interfaces could be used by web programmers.

Advogato saw use as a testbed for social networking and semantic web technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, who was an Advogato user himself, included Advogato in a short list of sites notable for their early adoption of the FOAF as a method of exporting user RDF URIs.

Trust metric
The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant trust metrics, having users certify each other in a kind of peer review process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites. Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the PageRank algorithm used by Google to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others.

The implementation of this trust metric was through an Apache module called mod_virgule. mod_virgule is free software, licensed under the GPL and written in C.

Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato were gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution was faulty.

Misunderstanding of the purpose of Advogato's trust metric was common, which often led to the assumption that it should exclude specific individuals on the basis that they were known cranks.

Advogato and mod_virgule references

 * Raph Levien (2004). Attack Resistant Trust Metrics. Early draft of abandoned PhD manuscript.
 * Raph Levien (2007). Lessons From Advogato (video) (abstract). Google Tech Talks, June 25, 2007.
 * Jesse Ruderman (2004). A comparison of two trust metrics.
 * Mary Tyler (2004). Behind four Linux community sites. Linux.com feature.
 * Even better than Slashdot, Salon.com
 * Social Forces and Constraint in the Attainment of Community Status
 * Steve Rainwater (maintainer of mod_virgule 2007 - 2016).

title: Advogato