[citation needed] Defert was the author of numerous articles in the domain of ethno-iconography and public health.

[4] He was awarded the decoration of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur[5] and received the Alexander Onassis prize for the creation of AIDES in 1998.

[6] 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)[7] and Foucault left no official will; however Foucault had written a letter indicating his intention to bequeath his apartment and all its contents, which included his archive and corrected proofs for an unpublished manuscript, to Defert.

[citation needed] In 2013, Defert sold for €3.8m ($4.0m, May 2022)[9] 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.

[7] Additionally, many previous posthumous works had already been published,[10] 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;[7] by contrast, the letters exchanged between the two of them, Defert said in 2012, he intended to "take to his grave.