DURAS: 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 […] 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.

[…] 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 the 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.

[…] 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.

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: 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. […]

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. […]

Don't get the idea that things were easy for me before I arrived at the point where I said to my son: “Do what you want to.” I had to do a fantastic amount of work on myself. Moreover, I believe I wouldn't have written Destroy if I hadn't had this child. He's wild. He's impossible, but he has found something . . . something that's outside of all the rules. A freedom. He enjoys the use of his freedom. He possesses it. This is extremely rare. And I often observe hippies: my son goes around with them, there's a whole group of them . . . What is curious is that when you go from one to the other, you see hardly any difference at all in their relations with adults. It is within the group that they become different, do you see what I mean? They form a sort of common front against us. A friendly one. Not a violent one. But they all turn the same face toward us. When you come right down to it, you can't get to know them. You're going to think that it's because I have this son that I defend hippies: that would be too simple . . . One of his pals slept through the baccalaureat exam. They found him there asleep. Not a word. He didn't write a single word.

Duras interviewed (Destroy, She Said, appendix)