"that journey which lands us in a country free by default"

Near the end of Barthes's January 7, 1977 Collège de France lecture the author announces his appearance:

"... the myth of the great French writer, the sacred depository of all higher values, has crumbled since the Liberation; it has dwindled and died gradually with each of the last survivors of the entre-deux-guerres; a new type has appeared, and we no longer know -- or do not yet know -- what to call him: writer? intellectual? scribe? In any case, literary mastery is vanishing, the writer is no longer centre stage. On the other hand and subsequently, May '68 has revealed the crisis in our teaching. The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer impress; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with. Literary semiology is, as it were, that journey which lands us in a country free by default; angels and dragons are no longer there to defend it. Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a monument of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure."