You cannot read this text only once – direct reading must lead to an indirect, deeper one. I will start with the immediate. At first, we see in the first phrase only an indisputable, but banal principle, in which folk wisdom is expressed. The English language has made it almost a proverb: "Every kingdom divided against itself shall not stand."

The next sentence at first seems to be just an application of this principle: "And if Satan casts out Satan, then he is divided from himself: how then shall his kingdom stand?" Jesus does not answer this question himself, but the answer is clear: if Satan is divided from himself, his kingdom will not stand. If the Pharisees really see Satan as an enemy, they should not reproach Jesus for casting out Satan by Satan's power; even if they were right, Jesus' healing would only hasten Satan's final destruction.

But now there follows a new assumption and a new question: "If I cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub, by whose power do your sons cast out?" If my actions are from the devil, then from whom are your actions and those of your "sons" – spiritual sons? Jesus returns to the critics their accusations: it is they who cast out by the power of Satan, and as his own he affirms a radically different expulsion – the expulsion by the power of the Spirit of God: "But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then surely the kingdom of God has reached you."

At first glance, it seems that Jesus turned to completely fruitless polemical exaggerations. Indeed, when healers compete, each claims to be the only one engaged in the "good exorcism"—the most effective, the most orthodox, the only one that comes from God—while others, of course, engage in exorcism that comes from the devil. That is, we seem to find ourselves in a mimetic competition, where each expels the other, as, for example, Oedipus and Teiresias, rival soothsayers in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Thus, violence is ubiquitous, and it all comes down to the question of who is stronger. This is what the continuation of the passage, which I have not yet quoted, speaks of. The relationship between the two exiles is presented here in a vividly violent form:

Or how can anyone enter into the house of the strong and take possession of his possessions, if he does not first bind the strong? and then he will plunder his house (Mt 12:29*).

The first strong man is the devil, depicted as the rightful owner, or at least as the first inhabitant of this house. An even stronger person who defeats the first is God. But this way of looking at things is not the view of Jesus. God is not an ordinary robber. Jesus is speaking here in the language of his interlocutors, in the language of rival exiles, in order to reveal the very system of this language, the system of violence and the sacred. God is certainly stronger than Satan, but if he is stronger only in the sense of power that is meant in this passage, then he is simply another Satan.

This is how the Gadarenes interpret Jesus' actions in their community. They have a strong man – a demoniac who is also a "legion". This landlord makes their lives difficult but maintains some order. If Jesus had made their strong man powerless, then he must be even stronger. The Gadarenes fear that Jesus will take possession of all their possessions. Therefore, they strongly demand that he leave. They are not going to exchange one despot for another, even more despotic.

Jesus is speaking here in the language of the contemporary world, which often turns out to be the language of the Gospels themselves. Evangelists do not fully understand what is meant by Jesus' words. Their text is extremely elliptical; Perhaps distorted. In any case, Matthew sees well that not everything here is to be taken literally. There is an irony in the above words of Jesus that needs to be revealed, there is a meaning that is not visible at the polemical level, a level that is immediately obvious and the only one understood by Jesus' interlocutors, and today by most readers. Matthew prefaces these words with a significant introduction: "But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said to them..." Mark does not have this warning, but there is another, even more revealing: he warns that it is a parable (Mk 3:23). I think this warning is important for the very definition of parable discourse. It is an indirect discourse, often involving narrative elements, but sometimes, as here, for example, dispensing without. The essence of the parable in the Gospel understanding is the voluntary isolation of Jesus in a persecutory representation for the sake of people who, being its captives, cannot understand anything else.

Jesus uses the means of this system to warn people of what awaits them in the only language they understand, and in so doing he exposes both the immediate purpose of the system and the internal incoherences and contradictions of their discourse. At the same time, he hopes to shake this very system in the minds of his listeners, to help them hear in his words a second meaning, which is truer, but also more difficult, because it is alien to persecutory violence, a meaning that exposes this violence itself and the effect it produces on each of us of closure in a persecutory representation.

In the light of our discussions, it is easy to see that the idea of a second meaning is not illusory. This text really says more than we have been able to extract from it so far. In fact, this text sums up the essence of our results, clearly formulates the principle I have identified, the principle of violence expelling itself by violence in order to establish all human societies.

On the face of it, as I said above, the idea that any community divided from itself will soon perish seems to be a true but rather commonplace observation. Perhaps (we think) Jesus uttered a phrase that no one would argue with. And the second phrase then seems to be a special case of the first. What is true of every kingdom, every city, every house, must be true of Satan's kingdom.

But Satan's kingdom is not just a kingdom, as everyone thinks. The Gospels clearly state that Satan is the principle of every kingdom. In what ways can Satan be this principle? Being the principle of forcible exile and the lies that flow from it. The kingdom of Satan is nothing but violence that expels itself—exorcism in all the rituals and exorcisms that the Pharisees have in mind, but originally in that constitutive and covert action that serves as the model for all these rituals, for the unanimous and spontaneous killing of the scapegoat. Thus, the second sentence gives us a complex and complete definition of Satan's kingdom. It speaks not only of the fact that Satan must someday be destroyed, but also of the fact that he is alive and confirmed by his power, of his constitutive principle. Of course, it is strange that this constitutive principle and the principle of its final destruction coincide. There is something for the ignorant to be confused about, but there is nothing here that can confuse us. We know well that the principle of mimetic desire and the rivalry and internal division aroused by this desire coincides with the principle of social unity, also mimetic, the principle of the scapegoat.