Develops a theory of the referent that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real in theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less that it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the indentification of language with "Being". The principal texts on which Brodsky bases her analyses are Goethe's "Elective Affinities" and "Faust".