I’ve shared this before, but was thinking again about Daniel Defert’s memories of Foucault’s working routines in this interview – ‘The Materiality of a Working Life‘ (open access; original French).

No no, weekends didn’t exist! We would go to see art exhibitions on the Saturday afternoon, certainly, but the very notion of the weekend didn’t exist… Especially a public holiday, a Christmas day without writing, that was impossible! Foucault rarely put dates on his writings, but he would have been quite capable of putting “December 25th” on something, that being a day when, as he said, “nothing has happened for several thousand years.”

Interviewed by Alain Brosset and Philippe Chevalier; translated by Colin Gordon.