Introduction

For some time now, in newspapers and books, a series of words keep appearing that begin with the prefix “post-.” As for these new words, the key to understanding seems to be a semantics of ambiguity. Post does not indicate something absolutely different but something in-between: postcapitalism would be a new phase of capitalism; postmodernism, a new figure of modernism; and post-history, history again. In all these cases, to the same question – does “post-” mean a clear break or the more or less identifiable result of an evolution? – the same answer arises: “post-” is a “problematic prefix” that “debates over postmodernism and postmodernity taught us to treat not as a marker of definitive beginnings and ends, but as indicative of a more subtle shift or transformation in the realm of culturally dominant aesthetic and experiential forms” (Denson and Leyda 2016, 6).