The empty cage

by Carla Benedetti

In The Empty Cage, the highly regarded Italian literary critic Carla Benedetti explores the question: What is an author? Expanding Foucault's arguments beyond literary discourse into art, film, performance, and industrial design, Benedetti maintains that the author carries out a historical function, integrally connected to the modern system of artistic production and of aesthetic evaluation. In the modern period, she says, any object can be considered a work of art, on the supposition that it has been produced by an author. Her book, far from being an attempt to reclaim authorial intention as essential, proposes an original theory that shows how the author, in the form of author-images and even logos, has become an important link in the modern system of artistic communication. Discussing authors who include Borges, John Cage, Calvino, Duchamp, Proust, and Cindy Sherman, Benedetti addresses the principal aesthetic problems of modernity, showing how late modernity approached and refashio