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).

This complaint is indicative in the context of our analysis. The crowd of Gadara, as I have said, is less a crowd than the crowds without a shepherd to whom Jesus usually preaches. Their community remains more "structured" – thanks to its paganism. But the point here, of course, is not to exalt paganism to the detriment of Judaism, but that paganism has not yet reached the same critical point in its evolution.

The last crisis, which predetermines the final exposure, is both specific and non-specific. In its principle, it is identical with the wear and tear of all sacrificial systems based on the "satanic" exorcism of violence by violence. Biblical revelation and then evangelical revelation makes this crisis incurable. By divulging the secret of persecutory representation, it ultimately prevents the victim mechanism from functioning and from generating from the paroxysm of mimetic disorder a new order of ritual exorcism, capable of replacing the old, disintegrated one.

Sooner or later, the leaven of the Gospel must cause the collapse of the society into which it has penetrated, and of all similar societies, even those which at first sight seem to be based on it, i.e., the so-called "Christian" societies which really rely on it, but which rely on it in an ambiguous way and on the basis of a partial misunderstanding, an invariably sacrificial misunderstanding, rooted in the deceptive similarity of the Gospels and the usual religious-mythological statutes. "And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand" (Mk 3:25), Mark tells us, but the destruction of this house is not a greater exile coming from God or Jesus, but, on the contrary, the end of all exile. That is why the coming of the kingdom of God is destruction for those who always think only of destruction, and reconciliation for those who are trying to be reconciled.

The logic of a kingdom that will not stand if it is divided from itself has always been true in the absolute sense, but it has never been true in real history, thanks to the disguised mechanism of scapegoating that has always postponed the death of such a kingdom, restoring its vitality by sacrificial distinction, by the violent expulsion of exile. And now this logic has appeared in historical reality, first to the Jews, who were the first to hear Jesus, and then to the Gentiles, to the Gadarians of the modern world, who always behave with Jesus like the Gadarenes of the Gospel, even when they officially proclaim themselves to be his followers. They rejoice that nothing curable ever happens to their societies, and therefore they are convinced that the catastrophes mentioned in the Gospel are just a figment of the imagination.

The first reading of the text about the demons of Gadara gives us the impression that everything is based on the logic of a double exile. The first expulsion never leads to a decisive result, it is simply the petty machinations of demons and the Gadarenes, who in fact conspired like swindlers in the bazaar. But the second exile is the expulsion done by Jesus, and it is a real cleansing — which in the end takes with it both the dwelling and all its inhabitants.

The same double expulsion (one within the system and stabilizing the system, the other external and destroying this system) appears explicitly in the text just examined: "If by the power of Beelzebub... But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God..." A deeper understanding shows that divine power is not destructive; It doesn't expel anyone. But the truth offered to people unchains satanic forces, that is, destructive mimeticism, depriving him of the ability to self-regulate. Satan's fundamental ambiguity entails an outward and explainable ambiguity of divine action. Jesus brings a double war into Satan's world because, in principle, he brings peace. People don't understand, or pretend not to understand. Our text is ideally designed to apply to both readers who understand and readers who don't. The phrases about human groups divided against themselves and about Satan expelling Satan mean both the ability of Satanic mimeticism to self-regulate and the loss of this ability. The text does not explicitly formulate the identity of the principle of order and the principle of disorder, it realizes this identity in phrases with a double meaning, which are infinitely fascinating, because they represent in chiaroscuro a truth that should not be too insistently drawn so that it can function in the text in the same way as it functions in reality; if we do not see it, then we are in the satanic universe and remain at the level of the first reading: we believe that there is a divine violence that rivals the violence of Satan, and therefore we remain prisoners of persecutory representation; And if we see it, it means that we understand that Satan's kingdom is about to perish, because the truth has been revealed, and we are already freed from the captivity of persecutory representation.