Foucault in a 1982 interview (in English):

“You see, I hate to say it, but it’s true that I am not a really good academic. For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself. I know that knowledge can transform us, that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call truth doesn’t decipher anything) but that if I know the truth I will be changed. And maybe I will be saved. Or maybe I’ll die but I think that is the same anyway for me. That’s why I really work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. My problem is my own transformation. That’s the reason also why, when people say, ‘Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,’ my answer is, ‘Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?’ This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?”