Based on the ideas of Cuntz and Quillen, we give a simple construction of cyclic homology of unital algebras in terms of the noncommutative de Rham complex and a certain differential similar to the equivariant de Rham differential. We describe the Connes exact sequence in this setting. We define equivariant Deligne cohomology and construct, for each n > 0, a natural map from cyclic homology of an algebra to the GL_n-equivariant Deligne cohomology of the variety of n-dimensional representations of that algebra. The bridge between cyclic homology and equivariant Deligne cohomology is provided by extended cyclic homology, which we define and compute here, based on the extended noncommutative de Rham complex introduced previously by the authors.
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