Destroy, She Said

by Marguerite Duras

  RIVETTE: But can't criticism of this knowledge that is obviously quite lucid, that is as exacting as possible, also play an active role? Not in the same way as ignorance, of course, and doubtless in a more active way than ignorance . . . I confess that this is an idea that I find at once attractive and terrifying; this is my own personal opinion; there is something that frightens me in the fascination with ignorance: I am afraid, in fact, simply because it is a fascination. I see what this path by way of ignorance may lead to, that is to say destruction as a capital stage, or to adopt a phrase that Jean-Pierre Faye often quotes: “destruction as a capital moment of a change from one form to another.” But at the same time is there not a risk, in fact, of going under within this moment, that is, of going under in such a way as to be entirely swallowed up? Do you really think that wiping the slate clean is the only . . .

  DURAS: What other means do you have of catching up with the rest of humanity? What other way do you have of reaching absolute zero? I went to Cuba a while ago. I spoke with students, I talked with people at the university. They said to me: “Should we read Montaigne? And Rabelais? We don't have them here.” What would you have answered? Even if I had said no, I still would have been posing as an authority. I said: “I have no opinion.” So then. We won't soon see the end of this state of affairs. And it doesn't matter that we won't. It is not because there is no solution that things are in a mess. May was a success. It was a failure that was infinitely more successful than any success at the level of political action, don't you think?

  RIVETTE: Absolutely.

  NARBONI: But that brings up two questions that I'd like to ask you. The first, which is clearly anecdotal: when you say “Freud and Marx today are classified as historical monuments,” do you mean by that that there is a certain fetishism that operates where they're concerned, that completely paralyzes their thought, or that refers to it as if it were dogma . . .

  DURAS: What I meant was the Freud used for psychoanalytic ends. Freud can't be read freely. Reading Freud is not within everybody's reach. It ought to be—especially since Freud is easy to read. But our reading of Freud is already a prey of worldwide interpretation. Yes: when you come down to it, what I said was facile.

  NARBONI: I am going to mention a third name that is perhaps also classified as a historical monument.

  DURAS: Lenin?

  NARBONI: Yes, yes. When the revolution of 1917 took place in Russia, Lenin found himself faced with endeavors that were more or less like a certain endeavor that was undertaken in May, one that I believe you would like to help carry out: namely a sort of tabula rasa, a rejection of knowledge that would be the basis for a completely new start along a communist path, and Lenin, at the very height of his practical, political, military, and theoretical activity, always opposed these theories—those of the Proletkult, for example.

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  DURAS: . . . it's like doing away with war and talking about it in films: you see what I mean. As long as war films continue to be made, war will be attractive. The films that fight war the hardest are still films . . . in favor of war—except that that's not the word I was looking for.

  NARBONI: Yes, it's obvious that pacifist films are war films in the last analysis.

  DURAS: That's the way things go all down the line. And so it is with knowledge . . . As far as knowledge is concerned, it should be understood that what I say is absolutely unrealizable. I am smack in the middle of Utopia. I know this. But this isn't important. I can still say it. Just because you don't know where you're going is no excuse for not going on. That doesn't matter at all to me.

  RIVETTE: Is it a Utopia to make people angry? Is it a Utopia to mark a limit? To score a point?

  DURAS: It's a postulate. Using it as a base, I can write, I can do things . . .

  RIVETTE: But is it to score a point?

  DURAS: Yes, it may be. In fact, there's absolutely no doubt that it is.

  RIVETTE: Because, for example, the phrase that is not in the book and that you've added to the film is precisely: “Books must be thrown away.”

  DURAS: Yes. Because I throw them away myself, perhaps. It's as simple as that.

  RIVETTE: But you didn't put this phrase in the book . . .

  DURAS: Because I didn't think about it. Like the phrase on destruction. I didn't put in: “What's at stake here? Your destruction.”

  RIVETTE: And if you were writing the book now, these phrases would be in the book . . .

  DURAS: Yes. But you know . . . young people . . . I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new. Faye is a man who reads. He wants to destroy knowledge, but from within knowledge. But I would like to destroy it in order to replace it with a void. The complete absence of man.

  RIVETTE: I understand perfectly, but—I won't venture to say that we are scholars like Faye . . .

  DURAS: In any case, I've never been a scholar either . . . I've studied mathematics, law, political science—that is to say very . . . vague disciplines. Except for math. And it wasn't because I had a taste for them. Any precise taste. It was more of a mechanism. Do you belong to the Communist Party?

  No, no one at the Cahiers is a member?

  How about you? Are you a member?

  NARBONI: No, I'm not, but there are many points, and one in particular, on which my position would be closer to a . . . a sort of attempt to bring about concrete achievements rather than this recourse to a void. I understand how tempting the notion of “creating a void” may be, however . . .

  DURAS: This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a vacuum.

  RIVETTE: If it's an active operation, yes, but isn't there the danger, in fact, that this operation of creating a void, which is something active, may become a purely passive state?

  DURAS: They have to go through a passive stage. That's what I think. They're in this stage now.

  RIVETTE: Yes, but going through a passive stage is still an activity. If I may make a play on words . . .

  DURAS: Yes, but I don't really agree with you there. Because they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most . . . They create a void, and all this . . . this recourse to drugs, I think is a . . . It's not at all an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them—it's much too early for that.

  NARBONI: Yes, but if one takes the hippie phenomenon, for example, and if one judges it over a period of years, it's obvious that it soon reached its limit of political apathy, and that a whole sector, in fact, of those . . .

  DURAS: In America?

  NARBONI: Yes. It's obvious that after a short time, this sort of parallel world, created by fencing off secondary areas alongside a system that they refused to see (and which also exists, really exists), proved to be perfectly comfortable. And among the hippies, a fraction became politically aware and quit the hippie milieu and became a part of American political activity, joining the SDS and so on.

  DURAS: That's true. But they at least had that rest period beforehand.

  NARBONI: Yes, but not all of them. Some of them did become politically aware, and others are staying within this sort of emptiness, which may possibly be a first stage, but it risks being nothing but a comfort, it has every possibility of becoming a comfort!

  DURAS: But even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force.

  RIVETTE: That is to say that by their number, they represent something that is a “gap” in the system, but can this gap suffice to block the system?

  DURAS: No, they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now?

  RIVETTE: But can this question block the system? On th
e contrary, isn't this system powerful enough to finally work its way around it, to isolate it, to make it a sort of abscessed pocket?

  DURAS: But if this state of affairs gets worse, it will be a terrible thing. If it gets worse, it's the end of the world . . . If all the young people in the world start doing nothing . . . the world is in danger. So much the better. So much the better.

  RIVETTE: Yes, but it's like going out on strike. It has to be really a total, absolute, general strike . . .

  DURAS: Yes, precisely, precisely. It's like a strike.

  RIVETTE: But it's necessary . . .

  DURAS: For there to be Soviets.

  RIVETTE: On the one hand, and on the other hand, the thing makes no sense unless it's really total: unless everything comes to a halt as was almost the case during the three weeks in May . . .

  NARBONI: But what the workers who go out on strike do is occupy their factories, and protect their means of production. They don't destroy them.

  DURAS: Yes; but the workers define the circuit of production. They defend their definition. They are all Leninists—naturally.

  NARBONI: But I think as a matter of fact that everyone should be; and those who would seem to be the most likely to be because of the time they have available, and because of their intellectual faculties, and so on—are in fact students, who, I think, should . . .

  RIVETTE: They should protect their means of production too.

  DURAS: That is to say?

  RIVETTE: That is to say their capacity . . .

  DURAS: What are they? By definition—and here Marcuse is right, though I don't agree with him on all points—by definition they are outside the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. He is not only outside every sort of security, every sort of social welfare, but outside of everything. Of all the means of production, of any sort of definition.

  RIVETTE: But the student is someone who is not outside the circuits of production, because finding a place, in one way or another, within the circuit of knowledge is also a form of production after all—one that obviously is not the same as production by workers (we must not make such crude correlations), but there is nonetheless an “instrument” that must perhaps be protected. Not “protected” in the reactionary sense represented by deans of universities, but . . .

  NARBONI: Diverted for their own benefit.

  RIVETTE: But not destroyed. What I mean is: the reactionary use of this instrument must be destroyed, but not the instrument itself.

  DURAS: That would be the ideal. But this is not possible in practice.

  NARBONI–RIVETTE: Why isn't it possible?

  DURAS: I for my part wanted the action committees to go into the factories and have the workers lecture to us. It would be necessary to completely reverse the roles. I didn't want the workers to be told anything. There is, if you like, something to this business of going into the factories and taking them over that is . . . something like a continuation of Stalinism. Because . . .

  NARBONI: Or a continuation of populism . . .

  DURAS: It's the most backward sort of workers’ movement; it's a fantastic danger. And every neophyte falls into this trap; it can't be avoided.

  RIVETTE: It's a form of nineteenth century charity . . .

  DURAS: Absolutely . . . paternalism . . .

  RIVETTE: There's a worker-priest side to it that is very dangerous . . .

  DURAS: The worst possible thing.

  NARBONI: It's precisely at this point that I can no longer follow this sort of negation, this return to zero, because the gravest risk seems to me to be a deviation of a religious type, an almost religious conception of revolution, which to my mind is very dangerous.

  DURAS: I don't see the religious side you see. A void is something that you live. There is no religion based on a void. Or, if you will, there is an age-old instinct that impels these young people to go in for almost any sort of mysticism, whether it be Maoism or Hinduism, for the moment, but I think this is an incidental factor. That's all the farther it goes. Or else, you might put it that China is having a great mystico-communist experience; I quite agree. I also believe that they are trying to reach the zero-point; but they are taking a very unusual path to get there. For obviously the cult of personality . . . But it is doubtless necessary to go by way of this axis, this pivot-point: Mao is like a sort of geographical point, perhaps, nothing more. As one says “Mao's China” . . . a rallying point . . . Perhaps it's different from what happened in Russia. One hopes so . . .

  NARBONI: The idea underlying the principle of destroy is that once a type of real communication between people is re-established . . .

  DURAS: An almost physical type, if you will . . .

  NARBONI: . . . the revolution will follow. I don't believe this. I don't believe that if people managed to talk to each other, to communicate, this would be enough to necessarily bring about revolution. This seems to me to obscure a fundamental problem, one that doesn't stem from individual, intersubjective relations—that of class struggle.

  DURAS: You are right. But is it revolution that has made the revolution? Do you believe in revolutions ordered up from Yalta? And in like manner: is it poetry that made poetry? I don't believe so. I think that all of Europe is a prey to false revolutions. Revolutions against people's will. So then, what will make revolution?

  NARBONI: To get back to this idea of a void, of clean hands almost—I really think that this is to fall back into a sort of abstract idea of a rejection of every thing that is almost Christian . . .

  DURAS: No, it's not a rejection; it's a waiting period. Like someone taking his time. Before committing himself to act. That's the way I see it . . . It is very hard to pass from one state to another. Abruptly. It is even abnormal, unhealthy. If you like, the changeover by the popular democracies from 1940 to 1945 was a brutal one, one not freely consented to and . . . It is necessary to wait . . . You don't do something unless you undo what's gone before.

  NARBONI: Granted that you undo it, but you don't deny it by a show of force, by another diktat . . .

  DURAS: This wasn't a diktat . . .

  NARBONI: . . . which consists of saying: I place myself on the outside; the inside is gigantic and monumental; I'm not there, so it doesn't exist.

  DURAS: You're nonetheless taking the point of view of political ethics when you talk about all this, I think. There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word “void” is going too far . . . the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself . . . Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence . . . Do you see? I think that we must turn ourselves around. We must reason backwards now about many things. Everybody is neurotic, of course, because everybody is well aware that the world is intolerable. More and more so. And a place where we can't even breathe. Do you agree with this?

  NARBONI: Absolutely. These are precisely the consequences of that state of affairs.

  DURAS: But it's a hope that I'm expressing. I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution. Because I know that we are very, very far away. But here we touch on the problem of freedom. This very moment. We're on the very edge of it.

  RIVETTE: What disturbs me is the fact that people don't want to think about the work that the person must do, work that your will sets before you at the zero point. I believe there is no escaping the work one has to do on oneself, by oneself.

  DURAS: But is this work in the strict sense? You know that work was invented in th
e nineteenth century . . .

  RIVETTE: No, I'm speaking of a kind of work . . .

  DURAS: Inside the self?

  RIVETTE: Inside and outside: an interaction, in fact, between one's action on what for convenience’ sake is called the outside and then the reflux, the return of one's outer action back onto oneself . . .

  DURAS: But one can't escape this. And this action is always irreplaceable; it always remains strictly personal. No one can ever put himself in the place . . .

  RIVETTE: That is exactly why it seems indispensable to me for this zero point to be lived precisely as work, and not as something to which one would abandon oneself. Because from the moment that one abandons oneself to it, there is the danger of purely and simply remaining there, and getting bogged down . . .

  DURAS: Good enough. And after that?

  RIVETTE: And after that being duped. Being duped in one way or another.

  DURAS: Yes. But I much prefer being duped like that.

  RIVETTE: But when I say duped, I don't mean being carted off to an insane asylum, for example; I mean duped because one has got caught up in a myth that is just as alienating as the old myths.

  DURAS: Yes, but then one would be responsible for one's own alienation. These young people don't want to do anything. Anything at all. They want to be bums. I have a son who doesn't want to do anything. He says straight out: I don't want to do anything. He wrote me one day saying: “Be carefree parents; don't feel responsible for my adolescence any more; I don't want to be a success at anything in my life; that doesn't interest me. I'll never do anything.” He went off traveling all through North Africa . . . And he was often hungry; he was very thin when he came back. He took responsibility for the whole thing on his own shoulders. A sort of exemplary freedom, that I respect. It would be impossible to force work in an office, or a job as a messenger boy, as a TV assistant on this boy; I don't think I have any right to do that.

  RIVETTE: Absolutely. And when you say respect, I understand the word very well; as a matter of fact it is not anybody's place to impose, and even perhaps to propose, any sort of solution at all, but the respect that people have where such things are concerned . . .