XXVII. «Глобалистика и геополитика». 2011. № 1–2 William C. Gay* THE LANGUAGE OF PARTICULARITY AND THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY: FROM EMBEDDED RELATIONS OF POWER TO NONETHNOCENTRIC DISCOURSE The article is devoted to the issue of language’s particularity as an integrating factor of the society. <...> The author emphasizes that humanity today is experiencing an identity crisis, because the relationship between different social groups are based primarily on the basis of the concepts of «force» or «power». <...> If we are lucky, this language, our native tongue, coincides with the language that currently provides the most linguistic capital in the society in which we live. <...> The Language of Particularity Saussure showed the degree to which our linguistic choices are made for us by the words in the sedimented sign system of our language. <...> If this system sets all the choices we make in speaking and writing, then the thesis of linguistic determinism is true. <...> In Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, dissidents have found ways to talk and write about the world as they see it. * Уильям Гай— доктор философии, профессор Университета Северной Каролины (Шарлотт, США) 28 Nevertheless, even when some degree of linguistic voluntarism is granted, the preponderance of the language of particularity remains. <...> Many writers, in fact, celebrate (and often appropriately so) such particularity, specifically that which a social group chooses for its own self-description. <...> And, just as a language of particularity can be used to raise the self-esteem of a social group, it can be used just as easily to denigrate another social group. <...> At the same time, however, any language of particularity utilizes binary oppositions that describe a social hierarchy based on the elevation of some specific group over others. <...> Languages operate with binary oppositions that structurally support oppressive designations for various social groups. <...> These concerns lead me to situate the fact of our embeddedness in the language of particularity in the relation to the ideal of humanity. <...> In other words, the ideal of an understood language of inclusion can be the fulcrum for the transformation of everyday speech in ways that are less linguistically alienating and less linguistically violent. <...> In the next section, I will appeal to Marx’s notion of “species being” in order to support this value. <...> In fact, the history of philosophy <...>