Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was the most significant bridge figure from Nietzsche to the postmodern world. His ideas relative to hermeneutics can be grouped in three categories.

First, his epistemology rejected the Enlightenment claim to objective knowledge. With Nietzsche, we must focus on the individual and the specific. Therefore, language cannot express universal truth but only the personal experience of its user and/or interpreter.

Second, his anthropology: humans use language to express and to gain power. With Nietzsche, the basic human drive is the 'will to power.' To name something is to exercise power over it. We seek knowledge for the power it gives us. The goal of hermeneutics should therefore be to unmask those power drives which created the text before us.

Third, his historiography: we create history to make or preserve those mythical worldviews which enhance our power and status. There is no objective "world" behind our historical recording of its events; we choose which events to report and the interpretation we give them based on our ambition for power. "Truth" is the fictional fabrication of those who claim it. The result for language should therefore be to introduce discontinuity into the reader's life, jarring him or her into admitting that life is chaotic and subjective.