The idea of the "end of history", posited in the final chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, grounded the beginning of a discussion unleashed by the position assumed by Alexandre Kojève in his courses on Hegel in Paris, in the 1930s, and by their publication at the end of the 1940s (being reedited in 1968). This point of view reappeared with Francis Fukuyama’s article on the "end of history", published in 1989, in which he commemorated the end of the "real socialism" and the rise of The United States of America’s complete world hegemony. Now that the euphoria about the "new world order" subsided, also in virtue of successive major economic crisis, it is interesting to turn back to the question of the conditions under which concepts associated to that theme, especially the noun "post-history" and the adjective "post-historical" are acceptable. My point in this article is that aesthetics is a field in which these concepts are defensible. As examples of fruitful aesthetic reflections that take advantage of these concepts, I point out the notion of "post-historical art", by Arthur Danto, and the aesthetic unfoldings of the "post-history" issue, just as sustained by Vilém Flusser.
pop art; post-historical art; technical image; apparatus