In the story of Orpheus, the poet descends to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice from premature death, only on Hades’ and Persephone's condition that he does not look at her during the process.
To you this tale refers, Who seek to lead your mind Into the upper day; For he who overcome should turn back his gaze Towards the Tartarean cave, Whatever excellence he takes with him He loses when he looks on those below.
Leslie Hill has criticized the piece by arguing that by making claims on both literature and philosophy all at once, it "fulfils neither of them properly, with the result that, while on one level the story of Orpheus, as Blanchot configures it, indeed reprises and clarifies in theoretical terms many of the underlying arguments and themes common to Blanchot’s work as a whole, it also functions transgressively as a mise-en-abyme of the excessive, paradoxical logic it aims to describe – which is none other than the logic of law and transgression itself – and thereby disables the claim of philosophy or literary theory to be able to rescue literature from the otherness of darkness and bring it into the light.”[1] Another interpretation or usage of the gaze of Orpheus is by Geoffrey Sirc.
Urging the adolescent writer to break free of formal notions of form, Sirc views the journal as the media through which Orpheus yearns for Eurydice.
Sirc suggests that if "the Work is freed of concern, the gaze is transgressive, then we’re clearly not talking about the polished text, especially one oriented dutifully around the tiny truths available through an analysis of middle-brow media.
Mark Linder suggests: “The mirror stage is not an isolated event or situation that results in a particular configuration of vision: it is both a loss (of primordial polymorphous, autoerotic wholeness) and an ‘achieved anxiety’ (a precocious anticipation of an impossible maturity or return to wholeness.”[6]