Orpheus’s descent towards Eurydice and his inspired, yet destructive look back reveal the movement of writing?a movement which always depends upon the point towards which it tends and only through which a space opens that makes the dependence upon this point possible. Blanchot argues in “The Gaze of Orpheus”: “When Orpheus descends to Eurydice, art is the power that causes the night to open” (437). Orpheus is the artist whose work allows for the possibility of the most heroic of feats; surely no one else could save Eurydice from the depths of the night. Yet, as we know, Orpheus fails when he looks back toward the point which inspires his art, losing both Eurydice and his work. And, according to Blanchot, this failure remains at least as heroic as the initial descent. In this paper, I will discuss Blanchot’s conception of the artist/writer who descends and fails as Orpheus, managing to open a space where impossibility reigns. One could argue that The Space of Literature does not really focus on space at all that is, as a sort of positive and “graspable” thing but rather explores the literary movement towards a non-space, which inspires, yet always lies beyond, the possibilities of literature. The work makes a special demand on the writer to hand over individuality, accept solitude, and inhabit an outer space of utter exclusion. Like Orpheus, the writer opens onto the demand of the work and heroically descends towards the impossible origin that both inspires and destroys art.