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.

Then we understand what the Kingdom of God is and why it is not an unalloyed good for people. It is in no way like placing a herd of cows in ever-green meadows. It confronts people with the most difficult task in their history. Compared to us, there is something honest and sympathetic about the people of Gadara. They do not yet behave like demanding buyers of the consumer society. They admit that it will not be easy for them to live without scapegoats and demons.

In all the texts we have read, the demonological perspective persists, but it undermines itself. To complete its defeat, it is enough to slightly expand the jurisdiction of the theory of "scandal" that Jesus himself expounds and whose amazing explanatory power we have already noted many times. The texts I have commented on are representative, I believe, of the Synoptic Gospels as a whole.

In short, in order to complete the destruction of the demon, it is necessary to orient the text in the direction that Jesus himself points – in the direction of "scandal" and everything that this term implies, i.e. in the direction of the problem of mimeticism and its exorcism.

It is not without reason, as we see, that Mark and Matthew warn us not to stop at the letter of the greatest of all the demonological texts put into the mouth of Jesus himself. It is enough to turn to the dictionary to understand that the parable distortion of the text is a kind of concession to the mythological and violent representation that comes from the collective murder of the scapegoat.

Open your Greek dictionary on the verb paraballo, from which the noun parabole, "parable," is derived. The very first meaning of this verb clearly demonstrates that we are talking about such a concession, since it leads us directly to collective murder. Paraballo means to throw something into the food of the crowd to quench its thirst for violence, preferably a victim, someone condemned to death; With the help of such an action, apparently, the subject of the verb himself can get out of a dangerous situation. The orator resorts to a parable, i.e., to a metaphor, in order to prevent the crowd from turning against him. In the extreme, there is no such discourse at all that would not be a parable; Indeed, the whole of human language as a whole is most likely derived from collective murder, along with other cultural institutions. After particularly startling parables, the crowd is sometimes ready to turn to violence, but Jesus shies away from it because his hour has not yet come.

To warn readers that Jesus speaks in parables is to warn readers of the persecutory distortion so that they can take it into account. In the case of our passage, this necessarily means warning them against the language of exile. An alternative is unthinkable here. Not to see the parable character of the exile here is to continue to succumb to the deception of violence, and therefore to practice the type of reading that Jesus himself warns us about, and that it should be avoided, and that it is almost inevitable: "And the disciples came and said to him, 'Why do you speak to them in parables? He answered and said to them, "Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but it is not given to them <... > therefore I say to them in parables, that when they see, they do not see, and when they hear, they do not hear, and they do not understand" (Mt 13:10-13).

On this point, Mark connects the parable even more closely than Matthew with the system of representation against which the Gospels fight. For those who live in this system, he writes, everything "comes" in parables. Consequently, the parable, taken literally, does not take us out of this system, but strengthens the walls of the prison (but it would be inaccurate to conclude from this that the parable does not have the task of converting the listener). This is what the following lines mean – here again Jesus addresses His disciples: "It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to those who are outside all things come in parables; so that they look with their own eyes, and do not see; they hear with their own ears, and do not understand, lest they be converted" (Mk 4:10-12*; italics are quoted from Isaiah 6:9-10).