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.

This very process took place several times before our eyes. That is why at the beginning of the story of the murder of John the Baptist (as at the beginning of many myths) there is a quarrel between brothers-enemies. In the normal case, one brother ends up killing the other in order to give people the norm.

The second phrase ("And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided from himself: how then shall his kingdom stand?") — not simply the application of the principle postulated in the first sentence ("Every kingdom divided against itself will be desolate; and no city, no house, divided against itself, can stand"), — on the contrary, it is the second phrase that postulates the principle, the different applications of which the first sentence expounds. The order of phrases needs to be changed. You need to reread the text, starting from the end. And then we will understand why the first phrase remained in the memory of peoples. There is something unusual about her that goes beyond the banal wisdom that is noticeable at first. The Jerusalem Bible (the translation I quoted) does not fully express this "something beyond" because it does not repeat the adjective "everyone," which appears twice in the Greek original: "Every kingdom divided against itself will be desolate; and every city or house divided against itself will not stand." The repetition of the word "everyone" emphasizes the symmetry between all the forms of communities that are here named. The text lists all human communities, from the largest to the smallest: a kingdom, a city, a home. For some reasons that are not clear to us at first, he tries not to omit a single form, and the repetition of the word "everyone" emphasizes this effort, the meaning of which we do not see at the level of direct meaning. However, we are not talking about either an accident or a stylistic effect that does not affect the meaning.

With all urgency, the text tells us this: all the kingdoms, all the cities, and all the houses were actually divided into themselves. In other words, all human communities, without exception, are based on the same principle, both creative and destructive, the principle that is postulated in the second sentence; they are examples of Satan's kingdom, and not Satan's kingdom (or kingdom of violence) is one of the many examples of society in the empirical sense of our sociologists.

Thus the first two sentences are more substantial than they seem; They summarize all fundamental sociology and all fundamental anthropology. But that's not all. In the dim light, the third and especially the fourth phrase, the most mysterious at first glance, become clear in the same way: "And if I cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub, by whose power do your sons cast out? Therefore they will be your judges."

Why will spiritual sons, that is, disciples, imitators, become judges of their teachers and models? The Greek word for "judges" is kritai; It carries the idea of crisis and division. Under the influence of mimetic escalations, the internal division of any "satanic" community is exacerbated; the distinction between legal and illegal violence is weakening; expulsions become mutual; sons reproduce and intensify the violence of their fathers, with results that are always more deplorable for all; Therefore, in the end, they understand the perniciousness of the father's example and curse their own fathers. About all that has gone before, they, like we ourselves today, make a negative judgment, which is also implied in the word kritai.

At first it seemed that the idea that divine violence existed and that it was the strongest of all flowed from our text; this idea is even explicit, as in the text about the miracle in Gadar, but at a certain level the interpretation is inverted, and we realize that divine exile does not exist at all—or, more precisely, that it exists only for persecutory representation, for the spirit of mutual accusation, in other words, for Satan himself. The power of exile always comes from Satan himself, and God has nothing to do with it; it is more than enough to put an end to the "kingdom of Satan." These are people separated by their mimeticism, "possessed" by Satan, mutually expelling each other to complete destruction.

But if the division against oneself (mimetic rivalry) and the expulsion of exile (the mechanism of the scapegoat) are not only the principles of the decay of human societies, but also the principles of their composition, then why does Jesus not take this second aspect into account in all these phrases that proclaim only destruction, phrases that are purely apocalyptic? Am I mistaken in thinking that I have found in this text the paradox of mimetic violence as the source not only of disorder but also of order? Perhaps the text is just as crudely polemical, unconsciously mimetic and basely dualistic as it seems on direct reading, which unscrupulous laziness hastily grasps at and which it does not try to surpass?