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?

It seems that Satan never stops casting Satan out, and there is no reason why he would stop doing so in the foreseeable future. But Jesus speaks as if the satanic principle had exhausted its ordering power, and as if every social order must now fall under its own disorder. The principle of order in our first two sentences is merely mentioned by stylistic effect, as if it were a more or less complete thing, doomed to destruction, which is the only explicit message, the only one accessible to most readers.

There is a designation of order, but precisely because of its presence in this and other Gospel texts, it can only be mentioned as something residual. Why? Because the violent order of culture, which is universally exposed in the Gospels—primarily in the Passion, but also in all the texts we have read, including this one—cannot survive its exposure.

The constitutive mechanism, the scapegoat mechanism—the banishment of violence by violence—becomes obsolete, invalid, as soon as it is exposed. He is no longer interesting. The Gospels are interested in the future opened to mankind by this exposure, that is, by the end of the satanic mechanism. If scapegoats can no longer save people, if the persecutory representation collapses, if a ray of truth has penetrated into the torture chamber, then this is not bad news, but good news: the God of violence does not exist; the true God has nothing to do with violence and now he speaks to us not through distant intermediaries, but directly. The son whom he sent us is one with him. The hour of the Kingdom of God has come.

"But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then surely the Kingdom of God has reached you." The kingdom of God has nothing in common with the kingdom of Satan and with the kingdoms of this world, which are based on the satanic principle of division against oneself and exile. The Kingdom of God is not concerned with any expulsions.

Jesus agrees to discuss his own actions in terms of exile and violence, because these are the only terms that his interlocutors are able to understand. But this is done only in order to inform them about an event that is incommensurable with this language. If I cast out demons by the spirit of God, then soon there will be no talk of demons or expulsion, since the kingdom of violence and exile is right now heading for its collapse. The Kingdom of God has reached you. The listeners are directly hailed. This Kingdom comes like lightning. Like the bridegroom of foolish and wise virgins, it lingered for a long time, but suddenly appeared.

The kingdom of God has reached you who are now listening to me, but it has not yet fully reached those Gadarenes whom I left without saying anything to them, for they have not yet reached the point to which you have come. Jesus begins to act when the time is fulfilled, that is to say, when violence can no longer expel violence and separation from oneself reaches a critical point, that is, the point of the scapegoat, which point this time becomes the point of no return, because even if this sacrifice appears to return to the old order for a short time, in fact it destroys it forever. by no means expelling him, but, on the contrary, being expelled by him and revealing to people the secret of his exile — a secret which Satan should not have allowed to be revealed, since it is on him that the positive side of his power, which regulates the power of violence, is based.

Always attentive to the historical aspects of revelation, Matthew, in the story of Gadar, puts into the mouths of two of his possessed words that only he has, which suggest a time gap between the world subject to the Law and the worlds that are not subject to it: "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, Son of God? Thou hast come hither before the time to torment us" (Mt 8:29).