Late modern cultural theory has since the 1960s tended to define culture in terms of signifying practice, making meaning and interpretation central concepts. However, a series of structuralist and poststructuralist waves have at the same time marginalised hermeneutics in cultural studies. The influential anti-hermeneutic challenges of Foucault, Kittler and Latour underline the necessity to abandon the romantic conceptions in much of classical hermeneutics. However, these critics tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and cannot ground late modern cultural theory. If taken fully seriously, the demand to abandon interpretation and replace meanings with some kind of materiality would evacuate cultural research or reduce it to plain physics. Instead, Paul Ricoeur’s critical textual hermeneutics offers a more useful polydimensional understanding of culture. This is a presentation of anti-hermeneutic challenges, discussing how they may be overcome by recharging key cultural concepts with energies deriving from taking these challenges seriously and letting them inspire a reconstitution of cultural theory from a post-anti-hermeneutic perspective.