Sheldon Gary Adelson - King of Las Vegas

Sheldon Gary Adelson (born August 1, 1933)[1] is an American billionaire businessman. He is a property developer and public company CEO based in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Adelson is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Adelson vastly increased his net worth upon the initial public offering of Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS) in December 2004 by selling just 10% of the shares. With an estimated wealth of US$26.5 bn, he is the United States' third richest person as of 2007[2].
Adelson has most recently come under fire for his close involvement with the 527 lobbying group Freedom's Watch, which has unsucessfully financed several Republican congressional candidates and had intended to raise as much as $250 million to attack Barack Obama's presidential campaign.[3] Adelson has also been criticized for aggressive union busting against employees of his Las Vegas casino properties.[4]
Adelson has also been accused of pursuing "despicable business practices" and having "habitually and corruptly bought political favour" by the conservative Daily Mail of London, although Adelson successfully sued the newspaper for libel in 2008.
As of 2008 Adelson was reported to be in poor health, relying on a cane to walk.

Adelson's parents were Jewish. His mother's family emigrated to the United States from Ukraine; his father's family came from Lithuania[6] Adelson was born and grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, a rough-and-tumble section of Boston, where his father drove a taxicab. [7]
He worked at a young age selling newspapers on local street corners and owned his first business by the time he was twelve. In the years that followed, he worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. He started a business selling toiletry kits, and in the 1960s he started a charter tours business with two friends. [7] He went to college at City College of New York but did not complete a degree there.

The basis for Adelson's wealth and current investments was the computer trade show COMDEX, which he and his partners developed for the computer industry; the first show was in 1979. It was the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s.[7]
In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, the former hangout of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, in order to bring Las Vegas to a new phase of business centricity through the exhibition industry. The following year, Adelson and his partners constructed the Sands Expo and Convention Center, the only privately owned and operated convention center in the United States.
In 1991, while honeymooning in Venice with his wife Miriam (a physician), Adelson said he found the inspiration for a mega-resort hotel. He razed (by implosion) the venerable Sands and spent $1.5-billion to construct the The Venetian, a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino. The luxurious, all-suite Venetian revolutionized the Las Vegas hotel industry, and has been honored with architectural and other awards naming it as one the finest hotels in the world. In 2003, The Venetian added the 1,013-suite Venezia tower - giving The Venetian 4,049 suites, 18 leading-chef restaurants, a shopping mall with canals, gondolas and singing gondoliers.
In 1995, Adelson and his partners sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to SoftBank Corporation of Japan for $862 million; Adelson's share was just over $500 million.[7]
Adelson spearheaded a major project to bring the Sands name to the Macao SAR, China, the Chinese gambling city that was a Portuguese colony until December 1999. The one million-square-foot Sands Macau became the People's Republic of China's first Las Vegas-style casino when it opened in May 2004.
In May 2006, Adelson's Las Vegas Sands was awarded a hotly contested license to construct a casino resort in Singapore's Marina Bay. The new casino is expected to open in 2009 at a rumored cost of $3.16 billion.
In August 2007, Adelson opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel on Cotai and announced that he planned to create a massive, concentrated resort area he called the Cotai Strip, after its Las Vegas counterpart. Adelson said that he planned to open more hotels under brands such as Four Seasons, Sheraton and St. Regis. His Las Vegas Sands plans to invest $12 billion and build 20,000 hotel rooms on the Cotai Strip by 2010.[8]
In September 2007, Adelson announced that the Sands would open its second hotel, the Sands Macao Hotel in Macau in October of that year.[9]
In 2007, Adelson made an unsuccessful bid to buy controlling interest in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. When this failed, he proceeded with parallel plans to publish a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left. [10] The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007.
In March 2008, Adelson won a ₤4 million judgement against the Daily Mail, for libel. He had been accused of "despicable business practices" and "habitually and corruptly bought political favour". Adelson said he would donate the damages to the Royal Marsden cancer hospital in London.

Since 1991, Adelson has been married to Miriam Ochshorn, a physician who works with drug addicts.[12] Adelson fathered at least two sons, Mitchell and Gary. Both of Adelson's sons have struggled with drug addiction, Mitchell dying from an overdose in 2005.

Adelson currently has funded over $25 million to the M.I.S. Hebrew Academy in Las Vegas to build a high school. Currently, the high school has a 9th and 10th grade and will add more grades annually.
In 2005, Adelson was among 53 entities that contributed the maximum of $250,000 to the second inauguration of President George W. Bush.[13] [14] [15]
In 2006 Adelson contributed $25 million to the organization Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel. The gift is anticipated to be given annually for the foreseeable future [16]
In 2007 Adelson founded Freedom's Watch, a group that advocates America's continued involvement in the war in Iraq, and is run and supported, in part, by former officials of the Bush administration. Also in 2007, Adelson pledged another $25 million to the Birthright Israel program, allowing for approximately 20,000 people to take part in the program. [17]
Adelson also has funded the Boston based Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation. AMRF is a private foundation committed to a model of open and highly integrated collaboration among outstanding investigators who participate in goal-directed basic and clinical research to prevent, reduce or eliminate disabling and life-threatening illness. [18]
This foundation initiated the Adelson Program in Neural Repair and Rehabilitation (APNRR) with $7.5 million donated to collaborating researchers at 10 universities. [19] Adelson has publicly pledged billions to medical research and has encouraged researchers to contact AMRF with ideas that need to be funded.
Along with his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson was presented with the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution.[20] The ceremony was held on March 25, 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The other award recipient that night was Wayne Newton, who received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service.

A világ legnagyobb kaszinója kétszer akkora, mint a Las Vegas-i Venetian. Az amerikai befektető szerint 2,4 milliárd dolláros befektetése 3-5 éven belül fog megtérülni. A kaszinót Sheldon Adelson amerikai milliárdos avatta fel. A kaszinó-, hotel- és szórakoztatókoplexumhoz 3000 szállodai szoba, 1150 játékasztal, 7000 nyerőautomata, 350 üzlet, egy 1800 férőhelyes konferenciaközpont és egy 15 ezer férőhelyes sportaréna is tartozik.

2004 májusa nagy fordulatot hozott Makaó – és a helyi szerencsejáték-ipart addig uraló milliárdos mágnás, Stanley Ho – életében: Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas ura, a világ hatodik leggazdagabb embere negyvenezres tömeg ünneplő gyűrűjében megnyitotta első kaszinóját a városban… A 265 millió dollárból épült gigantikus Sands Casino a sziget régebbi hasonló intézményeinek a szó szoros értelmében a fejére nőtt, ezért az egyeduralomhoz szokott Ho ellencsapásként megépítette az 52 emeletes, lótuszvirág alakú Grand Lisboa kaszinót. A Makaóért folytatott küzdelem startpisztolya tehát eldördült. Vajon ki lesz a nyertese – és ki az igazi vesztese az őrült vetélkedésnek?

Átadták Macaón a világ legnagyobb kaszinóját
A Venetian Macao mintegy 2.4 milliárd dolláros beruházás, és Las Vegas valamennyi kaszinójánál nagyobb. Az új létesítményben 3,000 hotel szoba, valamint közel 550 ezer négyzetméteren 870 játékasztalt, és 3,400 darab pénznyerő automatát helyeztek el. A szórakoztató komplexumot létrehozó Las Vegas Sands, valamint fő tulajdonosa, az amerikai milliárdos, Sheldon Adelson elmondta: legnagyobb álmai közé tartozott, megépíteni a szórakoztatás fellegvárát Ázsiában az ázsiaiak számára.

Larry A. Silverstein

Larry A. Silverstein (born 1932) is an American billionaire real estate investor and operator and the head of Silverstein Properties, a real estate development group. Silverstein is also a member of New York University's Board of Trustees. Silverstein was the leaseholder of the World Trade Center property at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks and currently oversees its reconstruction.

Silverstein was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from New York University in 1952, and married in 1956. He also attended classes at Brooklyn Law School. He and his wife, Klara, have three children: Lisa, Roger and Sharon.
Silverstein became involved in real estate, together with his late father, Harry G. Silverstein, and then friend and brother-in-law, the late Bernard Mendik, buying buildings in Manhattan. In 1957, they established Silverstein Properties, as Harry G. Silverstein & Sons, and bought their first building. Mendik and Silverstein continued the business after Harry's death in 1966. In 1977, Mendik divorced Annette Mendik Silverstein, with the business partnership also splitting up at that time.[1] Mendik also cited disagreements over real estate strategies, with Mendik wanting to buy buildings while Silverstein wanted to build.

In 1980, Larry Silverstein won a bid to lease and develop the last undeveloped parcel from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build the 47-story 7 World Trade Center.

During the 1990s, New York was suffering from the effects of the 1987 stock market crash, which led to high vacancy rates at the World Trade Center. George Pataki became Governor of New York in 1995 on a campaign of cutting costs, including privatizing the World Trade Center. A sale of the property was considered too complex, so it was decided by the Port Authority to open a 99-year lease to competitive bidding.[3]
In January 2001, Silverstein, via Silverstein Properties and Westfield America, made a $3.2 billion bid for the lease to the World Trade Center. Silverstein was outbid by $50 million by Vornado Realty, with Boston Properties and Brookfield Properties also competing for the lease. However, Vornado withdrew and Silverstein's bid for the lease to the World Trade Center was accepted on July 24, 2001, seven weeks before the buildings were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks. This was the first time in the building's 31-year history that the complex had changed management.
The deal was described in a press release on July 24, 2001:
"Silverstein Properties, Inc., and Westfield America, Inc. will lease the Twin Towers and other portions of the complex in a deal worth approximately $3.2 billion – the city's richest real estate deal ever and one of the largest privatization initiatives in history."[4]
The lease agreement applied to One, Two, Four and Five World Trade Center, and about 425,000 square feet (39,500 m²) of retail space. Silverstein put up $14 million of his own money to secure the deal. [5] The terms of the lease gave Silverstein, as leaseholder, the right to rebuild the structures should they be destroyed and should he comply with the onerous financial obligations of the lease.

While Silverstein is most famous for his involvement at the World Trade Center, his real estate holdings include many other buildings in New York City.
As of 1978, Silverstein owned five buildings on Fifth Avenue, as well as 44 Wall Street, and a shopping center in Stamford, Connecticut.[1] In 1980, he bought the building at 120 Wall Street, which was constructed in 1930. Also in 1980, he renovated the building at 11 West 42nd Street, acquired the lease for the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway.
Other buildings include:
One River Place (42nd Street west of 11th Avenue)
Two River Place
529 Fifth Avenue
570 Seventh Avenue
Silverstein was also involved as a developer of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.
In November 2006, Silverstein agreed to buy the building at 99 Church Street from Moody's for $170 million.[7] Moody's is slated to move its headquarters into 7 World Trade Center in 2007. 99 Church Street, built in 1951, contains 441,000 square feet (41,000 m²) of space.[8] Depending on market demands, the building may continue to be used as office space or as a mixed-use structure, which would also include apartments.[8]
In 1989 Silverstein proposed to members of the Israeli government that a Free-Trade zone should be created within the Negev region of Israel. The project ultimately failed, however it enjoyed popular support amongst leading Israeli political figures.

As a private developer with a 99-year lease on 1WTC, 2WTC, 4WTC, and 5WTC, Silverstein insured the buildings. The insurance policies on these four buildings were underwritten by 24 insurance companies for a combined total of $3.55 billion in property damage coverage.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Silverstein sought to collect double the face amount of that coverage (~$7.1 billion) because, he contended, the two separate airplane strikes constituted two occurrences within the meaning of the policies. The insurance companies took the opposite view. Because some of the policies contained certain limiting language and some did not, the court split the insurers into two groups for jury trials on the question of whether their policies were subject to the “one occurrence” interpretation or the “two occurrence” interpretation.
The first trial resulted in a verdict on April 29, 2004, that 10 of the insurers in this group were subject to the “one occurrence” interpretation, so their liability was limited to the face value of those policies, and 3 insurers were added to the second trial group.[10][11] The jury was unable to reach a verdict on one insurer, Swiss Reinsurance, at that time, but did so several days later on May 3, 2004, finding that this company was also subject to the “one occurrence” interpretation.[12] Silverstein appealed the Swiss Re decision, but lost that appeal on October 19, 2004.[13] The second trial resulted in a verdict on December 6, 2004, that 9 insurers were subject to the “two occurrences” interpretation and, therefore, liable for a maximum of double the face value of those particular policies ($2.2 billion).[14] The total potential payout, therefore, was capped at $4.577 billion for buildings 1, 2, 4 and 5.[15]
In 2007, Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey filed a lawsuit against some of its insurers for failure to pay out insurance proceeds following the 2004 verdicts, and that litigation was settled in late May, 2007.[16][17][18] [19][20] Silverstein's lease with the Port Authority for the World Trade Center requires him to continue paying $102 million annually in base rent.[21] He is applying insurance payments toward the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site.

Silverstein had the legal right to rebuild office buildings including the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site and while the site is unoccupied, he continues to pay $10 million per month in rent to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After several months of negotiation, in April 2006 he yielded some of those rights back to the Port Authority.
Ground was broken on the construction of the Freedom Tower on April 27, 2006. [23] Lack of financing had prevented construction from commencing earlier. The proceeds of the insurance payments from the destruction of the previous buildings alone were insufficient to cover the cost of rebuilding all the planned buildings.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States Congress approved $8 billion in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds to fund development in the private sector at lower-than-market interest rates. $3.4 billion remained unallocated in March 2006 designated for Lower Manhattan, with about half of the funds under the control of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the other half under the control of former Governor George Pataki.
Negotiations were held to obtain concessions from Silverstein in exchange for allocating the Liberty Bonds to the World Trade Center rebuilding. The concessions were to give back to the Port Authority rights to build and operate the Freedom Tower and another office tower, a share of the insurance payments, and not to contest the allocation to the Port Authority of Liberty Bonds. The Port Authority, a public agency, already has the ability to issue its own tax-exempt debt. The Port Authority will have its proposal in final form in September 2006. In return, the Liberty Bond funds were allocated to Silverstein and government agencies will be anchor tenants in his three office towers. This allows construction to commence.
In March of 2007 Silverstein appeared at a rally of construction workers and public officials outside of an insurance industry conference to highlight what he describes as the failures of insurers Allianz & Royal and Sun Alliance to pay $800 million in claims related to the attacks. Insurers cite an agreement to split payments between Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority as a cause for concern.[24]
In summary, Silverstein retains rights for Towers Two, Three, and Four. The Freedom Tower (designated as Tower One) will be owned by the Port Authority as well as Tower Five which may be leased out to another private developer and redesigned as a residential building.

Munkához láthattak végre tegnap New Yorkban a 2001. szeptember 11-én terrortámadásban lerombolt World Trade Center (WTC) helyén létesülő emlékhely és múzeum, valamint toronyházak építői, miután a területet birtokló New York-i és New Jersey-i kikötői hatóság, valamint a bérlő, Larry Silverstein építési vállalkozó szerdán megegyezett egymással – írta az AP. A megállapodás értelmében a milliárdos üzletember – aki nem sokkal a merénylet előtt megszerezte a komplexum haszonbérleti jogát – átadta a szimbolikus jelentőségű Szabadság-torony építésének ellenőrzését az állami hivataloknak. Az elhúzódó megbeszélések többször, utoljára egy hónapja szakadtak meg, mert a New York-i hatóságok szerint Larry Silverstein rosszhiszemű magatartást tanúsított az üzleti tárgyalásokon. A vita a Szabadság-torony építése körül lángolt fel. Mint megírtuk, Silverstein elképzelése szerint a WTC helyett épülő Szabadság-torony 72 emeletes épületének hatvan szintjét irodák, tízet pedig üzletek és éttermek foglalnának el. A létesítményre a későbbiekben még négy torony felhúzását is tervezi a vállalkozó, ennek időpontját anyagi lehetőségeitől tette függővé. Mivel Silverstein havi tízmillió dollár haszonbérleti díjat fizet a területért, de még nem kapta meg a teljes biztosítási összeget, sőt költséges perek elébe néz, az állami hivatalok attól tartottak, hogy elfogy a pénze az építkezés befejezése előtt, és a díjjal is adós marad. Ezért akarták átvenni az ellenőrzést az építkezés fölött. A mostani egyezség szerint a milliárdos az emlékhelyet körülvevő öt felhőkarcolóból négyet – köztük a Szabadság-tornyot – húzhat fel, míg a New York-i és New Jersey-i kikötői hatóság egyet. Silverstein a négyből két toronyház építésének ellenőrzését adta át a tulajdonosnak. Ha minden jól megy, akkor a munkákkal 2012-re végezhetnek. Larry Silverstein a 2001. szeptember 11-i merénylet előtt két hónappal szerezte meg a terület és az épületek bérleti jogát 99 évre. A szerencsétlenség után 4,6 milliárd dollár kártérítést ítéltek neki.

Jeffrey Jacob "J.J." Abrams

Jeffrey Jacob "J.J." Abrams (born in 1966) is an Emmy Award-winning film and television producer, writer, actor, composer, and director.

Born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, Abrams first job in the movie business started when he was 15 when he wrote music for Don Dohler's film Nightbeast. J.J. Abrams attended Sarah Lawrence College where, during his senior year, he teamed with a friend to write a feature film treatment. Purchased by Touchstone Pictures, the treatment was the basis for Taking Care of Business, Abrams' first produced film, which starred Charles Grodin and Jim Belushi. He followed that up with Regarding Henry, starring Harrison Ford, and Forever Young, starring Mel Gibson, and is one of the creators of the TV series Lost.
Since 1996 Abrams has been married to Katie McGrath. Their 3 children are Henry (b. 1998), Gracie (b. 1999) and August (b. 11 January, 2006).

Abrams then collaborated with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay on the summer 1998 blockbuster, Armageddon. In 2001 he co-wrote and produced the film Joy Ride. In 1998 he made his first foray into television with Felicity, which ran for four seasons on The WB, serving as the show's co-creator (with Matt Reeves) and executive producer. Under his production company, Bad Robot, Abrams created and executive-produced ABC's Alias and is co-creator (with Damon Lindelof) and executive producer of Lost. He also served as executive producer of What About Brian and Six Degrees, also on ABC.
Abrams contributed in the writing process in Superman Flyby. He made his feature directorial debut in 2006 with Mission: Impossible III, starring Tom Cruise and is also directing the upcoming 11th Star Trek movie. Abrams is also the producer of the 2008 monster movie, Cloverfield. His partnership with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof is set to grow with the duo producing Star Trek together and also writing and producing an adaptation Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.
In addition to writing and directing, he composed the theme music for Alias and co-wrote the theme song for Felicity.
Abrams signed deals with Warner Brothers for new television shows and Paramount Pictures for new films worth around $50 million.

In 2005 Abrams received Emmys for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for the Lost pilot[2], as well as Outstanding Drama Series for Lost[2]. He is also an Emmy nominee for his Alias pilot script[2] and his Lost pilot script (co-written with Lindelof) [2]. Abrams won a Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Drama Series for Lost.

Jeffrey Jacob Abrams (névváltozatai még Jeffrey Abrams vagy J. J. Abrams) (USA, New York, 1966. június 27. – ) amerikai film- és televíziós producer, forgatókönyvíró, színész, zeneszerző és filmrendező. Legismertebb munkái az ABC csatornán futó filmsorozatai: az Alias és a Lost. Egyik producere a 2008-ban bemutatandó Star Trek című filmnek.
Abrams New Yorkban született, majd Los Angelesben nevelkedett. A Sarah Lawrence College hallgatója volt Bronxvilleben. Apja, Gerald W. Abrams is televíziós producer.
2006. július 14-én Abrams aláírt egy 5 éves szerződést a Paramount Pictures filmgyártóval és 6 éves szerződést a Warner Bros. stúdióval, több, mint 55 millió dollár értékben.[1]

György Lukács

György Lukács (April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Lukács's full name, in German, was Georg Bernhard Lukács von Szegedin, and in Hungarian was Szegedi Lukács György Bernát; he published under the names Georg or György Lukács. (Lukács is pronounced /ˈluːkɑːtʃ/ by most English speakers, the original pronunciation being IPA: [ˈlukaːtʃ].)
He was born Löwinger György Bernát to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest. His father was József Löwinger (Szegedi Lukács József, b. Szeged) (1855–1928), a banker, his mother was Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél, b. Budapest) (1860–1917). Lukács studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. in 1906.

While attending grammar school and university in Budapest, Lukács's membership of various socialist circles brought him into contact with the anarcho-syndicalist Ervin Szabó, who in turn introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel. Lukács's outlook during this period was modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was involved in a theatrical group that produced plays by dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann.
Lukács spent much time in Germany: he studied in Berlin in 1906 and again in 1909-10, where he made the acquaintance of Georg Simmel, and in Heidelberg in 1913, where he became friends with Max Weber, Ernst Bloch and Stefan George. The idealist system Lukács subscribed to at the time was indebted to the Kantianism that dominated in German universities, but also to Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey and Dostoyevsky. His works Soul and Form and The Theory of the Novel were published in 1910 and 1916 respectively.
Lukács returned to Budapest in 1915 and led an intellectual circle, the Sunday Circle, or the Lukács Circle, as it was called, which was preoccupied above all with cultural themes arising out of a shared interest in the writings of Dostoyevsky, along the lines of Lukács' interests in his last Heidelberg years, and which sponsored events that gained the participation of such eventually famous figures as Karl Mannheim, Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs and Karl Polanyi amongst others, some of whom also took part in its weekly meetings. In the last year of the war, the participants divided in their political loyalties, although several of the leaders joined Lukács in his abrupt shift to the Communist Party.

In light of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. As part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi).
During the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic Lukács was a major party worker and a political commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army. In this capacity he ordered the execution of eight persons in Poroszlo in May 1919, after his division was worsted.
After the Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He was arrested but was saved from extradition thanks to the efforts of a group of writers which included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the former of whom would later base the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain. During his time in Vienna in the 1920s, Lukacs befriended other Left Communists who were working or in exile there, including Victor Serge, Adolf Joffe and Antonio Gramsci.
Lukács turned his attentions to developing Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus "History and Class Consciousness", first published in 1923. Although these essays display signs of what Lenin referred to as "ultra-leftism", they arguably carry through his effort of providing Leninism with a better philosophical basis than did Lenin himself. Along with the work of Karl Korsch, the book was attacked at the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924 by Grigory Zinoviev. In 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács also published the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin's manual of historical materialism.
As a Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun. His 'Blum theses' of 1928 called for the overthrow of Horthy's regime by means of a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. He advocated a 'democratic dictatorship' of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern and thereafter he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.

Lukács lived in Berlin from 1929-1933, but moved to Moscow following the rise of Nazism, remaining there until the end of the Second World War. Ironically, though many pro-Stalin foreign communists including his Hungarian colleague Kun were killed during the Great Purges of the late 1930s, Lukács survived.
After the war Lukács was involved in the establishment of the new Hungarian government as a member of the Hungarian Communist Party. From 1945 Lukács was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1945 and 1946 he explosively criticised non-communist philosophers and writers. Lukács has been accused of playing an "administrative" (legal-bureaucratic) role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals like Béla Hamvas, István Bibó and Lajos Prohászka, Károly Kerényi from Hungarian academic life. Non-communist intellectuals like Bibó were often imprisoned, forced into menial and low waged mental labour (like translation work) or forced into manual labour during the 1946–1953 period.
Lukács' personal aesthetic and political position on culture was always that Socialist culture would eventually triumph in terms of quality, but that this conflict would be fought as one of competing cultures, not by "administrative" measures. In 1948–49 Lukács' position for cultural tolerance within the party and intellectual life was smashed in a "Lukács purge" when Mátyás Rákosi turned his famous salami tactics on the Hungarian Communist Party itself. Lukács was reintegrated into party life in the mid 1950s, and was used by the party during the purges of the writers association in 1955-56 (See Aczel, Meray Revolt of the Mind). However, Aczel and Meray both believe that Lukács was only present at the purge begrudgingly, and cite Lukács leaving the presidium and the meeting at the first break as evidence of this reluctance.

In 1956 Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy which opposed the Soviet Union. At this time Lukács' daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács' position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. As such, while a minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in the refoundation of the Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party was rapidly coopted by János Kádár after 4 November 1956.(Woroszylski, 1957).
During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution Lukács was present at debates of the anti-party and revolutionary communist Petőfi society, while remaining part of the party apparatus. During the revolution itself, as mentioned in "Budapest Diary," Lukács argued for a new Soviet aligned communist party. In Lukács' view the new party could only win social leadership by persuasion instead of force. Lukács envisioned an alliance between the dissident communist Party of Youth, the revolutionary Hungarian Social Democratic Party and Lukács' own Soviet aligned party as a very junior partner. After 1956 Lukács narrowly avoided execution, and was not trusted by the party apparatus due to his role in the revolutionary Nagy government. Lukács' followers were indicted for political crimes throughout the 1960s and 70s, and a number fled to the West. Lukács' books The Young Hegel and The Destruction of Reason have been used to argue that Lukács was covertly critical of Stalinism as an irrational distortion of Hegelian-Marxism Lukacs/Hungary.
Following the defeat of the Revolution, Lukács was deported to Romania with the rest of Nagy's government but unlike Nagy, he survived the purges of 1956. He returned to Budapest in 1957. Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács was to remain loyal to the Communist Party until his death in 1971. Lukács became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and Hungarian Communist Party in his last years following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In an interview undertaken just before his death Lukács remarked: "Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician...But Stalin, unfortunately, was not a Marxist...The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory...The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil. Society is suffocated by it. Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic. People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move...". Thus Lukács concludes "[w]e must learn to connect the great decisions of popular political power with personal needs, those of individuals." (Marcus & Zoltan 1989: 215-16)

Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing Marx's theory of alienation before many of the works of the Young Marx had been published. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.
In the first chapter, "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined orthodoxy as the fidelity to the "Marxist method", and not to the "dogmas":
"Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders." (§1)
He criticized revisionist attempts by calling to the return to this Marxist method, which is fundamentally dialectical materialism. In much the same way that Althusser would later define Marxism and psychoanalysis as "conflictual sciences", Lukács conceives "revisionism" as inherent to the Marxist theory, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle:
"For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process." (end of §5)
According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.'... Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he thus criticized the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence — and thus the world — is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness, which is but the effect of ideological mystification, is accepted. This doesn't entail that Lukács restrain human liberty on behalf of some kind of sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.
Henceforth, the problem consists in the relationship between theory and practice. Lukács quotes Marx's words: "It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must also strive towards thought." How does the thought of intellectuals be related to class struggle, if theory is not simply to lag behind history, as it is in Hegel's philosophy of history ("Minerva always comes at the dusk of night...")? Lukács criticizes Engels' Anti-Dühring, charging that he "does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves." This dialectical relation between subject and object gives the basis for Lukács' critique of Kant's epistemology, according to which the subject is the exterior, universal and contemplating subject, separated from the object.
For Lukács, "ideology" is really a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining a real consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity", thus the structure of knowledge itself. Real science must attain, according to Lukács, the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal "laws" of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?",§5) Finally, "orthodoxical marxism" is not defined as interpretation of Capital as if it were the Bible or as embracement of certain "marxist thesis", but as fidelity to the "marxist method", dialectics.
Lukács presents the category of reification whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a party in the Leninist sense emerges, the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxian dialectic.
In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, in particular the belief in the proletariat as a subject-object of history" (1960 Postface to French translation), but he wrote a defence of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This unfinished manuscript, which he called Tailism and the Dialectic, was only published in Hungarian in 1996 and English in 2000 under the title A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. It is perhaps the most important "unknown" Marxist text of the twentieth century.

In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was an influential literary critic of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre. The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct characteristics.
Lukács later repudiated The Theory of the Novel, writing a lengthy introduction that described it as erroneous, but nonetheless containing a "romantic anti-capitalism" which would later develop into Marxism. (This introduction also contains his famous dismissal of Theodor Adorno and others in Western Marxism as having taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss".)
Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with the condition of modernity, while he criticizes Franz Kafka's brand of modernism. Lukács was steadfastly opposed to the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism. He famously argued for the revolutionary character of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac. Lukács felt that both authors' nostalgic, pro-aristocratic politics allowed them accurate and critical stances because of their opposition to the rising bourgeoisie (albeit reactionary opposition). This view was expressed in his later book The Historical Novel, as well as in his 1938 essay Realism in the Balance.

Lukács (Löwinger) György Bernát (Budapest, 1885. április 13. – Budapest, 1971. június 5.): zsidó származású filozófus, esztéta, egyetemi tanár, marxista gondolkodó, kommunista politikus; az MTA tagja (1948-tól).

Apja, Lukács (Löwinger) József, a Magyar Általános Hitelbank igazgatója volt, aki 1899-ben nemességet kapott „szegedi” előnévvel. Lukács György jogot tanult Budapesten. 1906-ban doktorált. 1906–1907-ben Berlinben tanult. 1904-ben Bánóczi Lászlóval, Benedek Marcellel és Hevesi Sándorral megalakította a Thália Társaságot. Alapító tagja volt a Vasárnapi Körnek (Balázs Béla, Fülep Lajos, Hauser Arnold, Mannheim Károly, Ritoók Emma, Tolnay Károly), és a Galiei körnek is. Publikált a Nyugatban, a Huszadik Században, és másutt.
1910-ben jelent meg első könyve, a Lélek és formák címmel. 1911-ig Berlinben, 1912-1917 között Heidelbergben élt. 1917-től részt vett a Vasárnapi Kör és a Szellemi Tudományok Szabadiskolájának munkájában. 1915 őszén nem fegyveres szolgálatba került, 1916-ban fölmentették. A háború megerősítette benne a kapitalizmus elutasítását, a forradalomban látta a kiutat.

1918 végén belépett a KMP-ba. 1919-ben, a Tanácsköztársaság idején helyettes közoktatásügyi népbiztos, április 3-tól népbiztos, május–júniusban pedig a Vörös Hadsereg politikai biztosa volt; e tisztségében a tiszafüredi vereség után Poroszlón tizedeléskor nyolc embert főbe lövetett [1]. A vörösterror támogatói közé tartozott. A bukás után egy ideig bújkált, majd Bécsbe menekült, ahol a bécsi Ideiglenes KB tagja lett. 1920-tól az MKP Bécsben működő Ideiglenes Központi Bizottságának a tagja. 1921-ben Landler Jenővel együtt kilépett a KB-ból. 1921-ben részt vett a Komintern III. kongresszusán Moszkvában. 1924-ben „jobboldali revizionistának” bélyegezték. 1926-tól ismét KB-tag. A Marx–Engels–Lenin Intézet munkatársa lett, mint tudományos kutató. 1941. június 29-én az NKVD letartóztatta, majd végén Taskentbe telepítették.

1945 augusztusában érkezett Budapestre. 1949-ben országgyűlési képviselő lett, amelyről 1951-ben lemondott, de 1953-tól ismét képviselő. 1945-től egyetemi tanár. 1948-tól a Magyar Tudományos Akadémia tiszteletbeli, majd rendes tagja. 1949–50-ben került sor az ún. Lukács-vitára, aminek középpontjában Lukács demokráciafelfogása állt. A támadások hatására nyilvános önkritikára kényszerült. Visszaemlékezésében Nagy Imrét „programnélkülisége” miatt hibáztatta. 1956 tavaszán előadást tartott a Petőfi Körben. 1956. október 26-án népművelési miniszternek nevezték ki. Részt vett az MSZMP Ideiglenes Szervezőbizottságának a munkájában. November 4-én a jugoszláv nagykövetségre menekült, majd azt november 18-án elhagyta. A szovjet hatóságok letartóztatták, és Romániába vitették. 1957. április 11-én hazatérhetett. 1965-ig belső emigrációban élt, és csak Nyugat-Európában publikált.

1967-től tagja lett az MSZMP-nek, amely a párttagságát viszamenőlegesen ismerte el. 1968-ban a sztálinizmus igazi alternatívájának a „szocialista demokráciát” nevezte.

Lukács György tanítványainak egy csoportja alkotta a 60-as években az ún. budapesti iskolát. Tagjai: Fehér Ferenc (1933–1994), Heller Ágnes (1929–) , Márkus György (1934–), Vajda Mihály (1935–). Tágabb értelemben véve Almási Miklós (1932–) és Hermann István (1925. október 10. – 1986. szeptember 12.) is körükbe tartozott. A budapesti iskola tanítványait szokta a publicisztikai zsargon „Lukács-óvodának” nevezi, mint például Kis János (filozófus), Bence György, Ludassy Mária, Radnóti Sándor.
Lukács egy másik tanítványa, Mészáros István (1930–) marxista filozófus 1956-ban Angliába emigrált.

Több életrajzíró és filozófiatörténész (ld. pl. C. Mutti, lentebb) szerint személyes felelősség terheli a korabeli magyar szellemi élet erőszakos, hatósági eszközökkel történő homogenizációjáért és több kiemelkedő magyar filozófus (pl. Hamvas Béla, Kerényi Károly) tönkretételéért, emigrációba kényszerítéséért vagy a szellemi életből való kiszorításáért; mint ennek a homogenizációs folyamatnak egyik programadója és szellemi útmutatója, és a Párt szempontjából nemkívánatos alkotók listáinak összeállítója.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (pronounced [ʒak dɛʁida][1]) (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work has had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. His best known work is Of Grammatology.

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar (near Algiers), then French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family, the third of five children. His given name was Jackie, though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name.[2] His youth was spent in El-Biar, Algeria.
On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students. At this time, as well as taking part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player), Derrida read works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Camus, Nietzsche, and Gide. He began to think seriously about philosophy around 1948 and 1949. He became a boarding student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which he did not enjoy. Derrida failed his entrance examination twice before finally being admitted to the École Normale Supérieure at the end of the 1951–52 school year.
On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. He also became friends with Michel Foucault, whose lectures he attended. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his philosophy agrégation on Edmund Husserl. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and in June 1957 married Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.
Following the war Derrida began a long association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists. At the same time, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and from 1964 to 1984 at the École Normale Superieure. His wife Marguerite gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. Beginning with his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his work assumed international prominence. 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—which would make his name.
He completed his Thèse d'État in 1980; the work 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 travelled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president.
Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third son, Daniel, in 1984.
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. UCI and the Derrida family are currently involved in a legal dispute regarding exactly what materials constitute his archive, part of which was informally bequeathed to the university.[3] He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, and The New School for Social Research.
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Cambridge University, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, University of Leuven, and Williams College.
In 2002, Derrida appeared in a documentary about himself and his work, entitled Derrida.
In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a Parisian hospital on the evening of October 8, 2004.

Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly speaking be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life. 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 precisely the false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks 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?[5]
In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[6] 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 originary 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.[7] It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.[8]
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs 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 that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.

At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of 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.[10] 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."[11]
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, thus leading to the notion that his thought was 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 enjoyed a mixed relationship.

Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena.[12] These three books contained readings of the work of many philosophers and authors, including Husserl, linguist de Saussure, Heidegger, Rousseau, Lévinas, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud. Derrida frequently acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would have not said a single word.[13][14] 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?"[15]
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[16], and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.[17] He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.[17][18]
Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture"[17], arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, sign/signifier, 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."[16] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction.
The next five years of lectures and essay-length work were gathered into two 1972 collections, Dissemination and Margins of Philosophy, and in the same year a collection of interviews, entitled Positions, was also published.

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas and The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
A sequence of encounters with analytical philosophy is collected in Limited, Inc. Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context," an essay on J. L. Austin, in the early 1970s; following an aggressive critique of this text by John Searle, Derrida wrote a long (and no less aggressive) defense of his earlier argument.
Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972. For a considerable period, however, Derrida's work influenced American literary critics and theorists much than it did philosophers.

Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" around 1994, heralded by the publication of Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship. Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.
Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as 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,[20][21] and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Here, Derrida followed Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject accordingly.[22]
Derrida did not move away from readings of literature; indeed, he continued to write extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

Jacques Derrida (El-Biar, Algéria, 1930. július 15. – Párizs, 2004. október 8.) nagy hatású és nagy vitákat kiváltó kortárs, posztmodern francia filozófus. A jelentés, értelem és ezek elméleteinek újszerű megfogalmazása gondolkodása eredetiségét tükrözi: nevezetes módszere a dekonstrukció, melyet mind a filozófiában mind az irodalomelméletben alkalmaznak (főként ez utóbbiban lényeges a konstruktivizmussal való szembenállása). Lényege a fogalmak, illetve irodalmi alkotások lebontása, visszabontása és sokszor a szabad asszociáción alapuló újraépítése, melyet újabb visszabontás követ, anélkül, hogy valaha is végső értelemmel bíró interpretációhoz jutnánk. A filozófiatörténetben kimutatja, hogy a filozófiai rendszerek alapvető ellentétességekre épülnek (pl. jó-rossz, külső-belső, egyes-általános), mely párok egyik tagját a rendszer előnyben részesíti a másik rovására. Az előnyben részesített fogalomnak azonban Derrida szerint csak a másik fogalommal való ellentétében van értelme. Tagadja, hogy a filozófia általános célja, a végső, lezárt rendszer lehetséges lenne. Lényeges fogalma az elkülönböződés (différance- szándékos betűcserével), mellyel a dolgok különbségükben történő megjelenését, különbségükben való létét érzékelteti, valamint a kiegészítés (suppléer), amely a dolgokkülönbözőségéből eredő hiányra vonatkozik. A szubjektum nem centrum, középpont, hanem bizonyos konstrukciók állandóan változó összessége. Az ember hiányaiból építkező lény, aki a folyton mozgásban lévő különbségek alapján fedezi fel a dolgok értelmét, melynek soron újabb és újabb kiegészítésre szoruló hiány keletkezik: nincs végső értelem, csak az interpretáció előrehaladása.