Daniel Defert (; 10 September 1937 – 7 February 2023) was a French sociologist and HIV/AIDS activist. Partner to the late Michel Foucault, Defert co-founded France's first AIDS advocacy group, AIDES, following Foucault's death from complications related to the disease. Defert was the heir to Foucault's estate.

Early life

Daniel Defert was born on 10 September 1937. He graduated from the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. He earned the agrégation in philosophy. Defert met Foucault while he was a philosophy student at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France and their relationship lasted from 1963 until Foucault's death in 1984.

Early academic career

A professor of sociology, Daniel Defert was assistant (1969–1970), maître-assistant (1971–1985), then maître de conférence (from 1985) at the Centre Universitaire of Vincennes, which became in 1972 Université Paris VIII Vincennes.

AIDS research and activism

After the death of his partner Michel Foucault from complications related to AIDS, Defert founded AIDES, the first AIDS awareness organization in France. The name invokes the French word for "help" as well as the English acronym for the disease (the French acronym is SIDA). Defert served as president of AIDES from 1984 to 1991. He was awarded the decoration of Knight of Legion of Honour and received the Alexander Onassis prize for the creation of AIDES in 1998.

Foucault estate

After Foucault's death, Defert inherited his estate despite the fact that their partnership preceded French government recognition of gay couples through civil unions (1999) or marriage (2013) Other family members deferred to Foucault's wishes, but without government recognition, Defert, like other surviving partners in a similar position, was still subject to much higher inheritance taxes than he would have been as a recognized family member.

Defert co-edited, with François Ewald, volume 4 of Dits et Ecrits of Michel Foucault (1994), a posthumous collection of Foucault's writing.

In 2013, Defert sold for €3.8m ($4.0m, May 2022) Foucault's archives to France's national library, making the material available to researchers; subsequently the family, which owns the literary rights, elected to publish the manuscript (Confessions of the Flesh, 2018, the fourth and final volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality), despite Foucault's instruction that no work be published posthumously. and Defert felt this new addition did not make any encroachment on Foucault's intimate life, but strictly contributed to the corpus of his intellectual contributions;

References

  • AIDES official website