Language is a thing that everyone uses but few care to know much about. At the same time, most people are every day confronted with problems which they do not know how to deal with and where they originate from. We fail to understand why things happen, we fail to communicate our failure to others, and instead we come up with excuses, rational and less rational, to help us forget about it. The aim of this Ph. D. thesis is to resist this memory loss. It is concerned with one thinker’s critical thoughts about us and our failures, and attempts to provide a certain continuation of them. It finds the chance to do this in a careful thinking of language, the “thing” that we all share for a fact. It finds it specifically in the language of literature, just like Paul de Man, the thinker concerned, did. This is not, however, to say that the general everyday world, with its disregard for musty academic exercises, would need to be abandoned in order to pursue such an interest. On the contrary, a good understanding of literature, and the particular forms it appears in, demands that the exact opposite be true. It is only, as I intend to show, that such an understanding is very difficult to arrive at. What, then, is “the break of Paul de Man”? That is the research question to begin with, exposed in all its profundity at the beginning of the thesis. The break, as is to be demonstrated, concerns not only theory and/of literature, and the kind of results we may expect from studying it, but the possibility of human understanding in its most general sense. How can something be known, and known for certain? This classical philosophical concern already shows that we will be entering perilous territory with the survey. There, in the shifting realms of epistemology and essence, nothing can be taken for granted and the very truth of the things around us is at stake, both rhetorically and for real. And, as the break of Paul de Man is made conscious in this manner, both in this study and in our everyday use of language, poetry and literature will be the “things” which always seem to be the most aware of the nature of the predicament. That is then the reason why the critical eye here ! constantly tends in that particular direction, providing us with unique views from the course of our journey. The authors discussed along the way make up some of de Man’s most important sources as his career evolves, and, in addition to them, other significant influences come to appear in the course of the study, as well. The movement is formidable, even intimidating, but it is also logically consistent – and necessary too because, without it, the journey could not continue. Meeting this requirement, my presentation is ordered chronologically in accordance with de Man’s own writings to show how his understanding (along with the conceptual toolkit resorted to) develops on the way. Nonetheless, at the end of the argument, I claim that, paradoxically and against the grain of de Man’s own desired truth, his understanding stays lodged exactly where it started out, unable to speak against anything or anyone. It will be the main burden of the conclusion to exhibit that inertia: to show at the same time both the inevitability and the limits set for it. Further ways will be pointed to sense truth and nature differently, to ask the big questions again. That critical insight, however, or any eagerness to embrace it, will always remain conditioned by the de Manian warning which forever cautions against believing too soon in what appears in the blinding light of language.