There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.

People always think that loyalty is laudable. People are always saying that we must remain faithful to tradition, to family, to our class, to our ideas. Of course not! That would be equivalent to zero brain activity. If you really want to think, to seek truth, to advance intellectually, you must turn your back on clichés, on preconceived ideas - even those belonging to your spiritual family. For an intellectual, his true duty is not to fidelity, but to infidelity.

Europe has certainly lost confidence in itself. This was something that, when I was a young man, we never imagined would happen.

I am 60, and I am as much an internationalist as when I was younger, when I was a Marxist-Leninist. Internationalism is one of the rare pieces of that heritage to which I remain loyal. That is Barack Obama's strength. A politician has finally understood that politics is not only about the closing of a mine in Ohio-it is also about the will to reach out, to embrace the world of today's young Americans. That way, young Americans may eventually reconcile with politics.

I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.

I don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.

In general, Europeans need to get a wider perspective on the problem of Islamism. Even if the Israel-Palestine question were solved - and I think and hope that one day soon it will be - this wouldn't stop one person from becoming a terrorist.