Abstract
This text focuses on Henry James's, on Honoré de Balzac's, and on Roland Barthes's contributions to an anti-modern sensibility. This is demonstrated both in the light of Antoine Compagnon's work on the antimodern in Les Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre a Roland Barthes (2005) and in its own discrete claims and terms, especially with regard to questions of experience, of entertainment culture and of the institution of a more general cultural sensibility; the article extends Compagnon's idea that to be antimodern is to be anticapitalist.
In this study, to be antimodern is to be a true modern, because it denotes that one has fidelity to what is most valuable in our ongoing cultural modernity that dates back to the rude energies of the seventeenth century.