Pragmatics are necessary for unconditional hospitality---else it becomes utopian and superfluous.

The tragedy, for it is a tragedy of destiny, is that the two antagonistic terms of this antinomy are not symmetrical. There is a strange hierarchy in this. The Law is above the laws. It is thus illegal, transgressive, outside the law, like a lawless law, nomos anomos, law above the laws and law outside the law (anomos, we remember, that's for instance how Oedipus, the father-son, the son as father, father and brother of his daughters, is characterized). But even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality, the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is constitutive. It wouldn't be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn't have to become effective, concrete, determined, if that were not its being as having-to-be. It would risk being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over into its opposite. In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this.

For this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too. The perfectibility of laws is at this cost. And therefore their historicity. And vice versa, conditional laws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality. These two regimes of law, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously. They incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another, they are dissociated at the moment of enveloping one another, at the moment (simultaneity without simultaneity, instant of impossible synchrony, moment without moment) when, exhibiting themselves to each other, one to the others, the others to the other, they show they are both more and less hospitable, hospitable and inhospitable, hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable".

Because exclusion and inclusion are inseparable in the same moment, whenever you would like to say "at this very moment," there is antinomy. The law, in the absolute singular, contradicts laws in the plural, but on each occasion it is the law within the law, and on each occasion outside the law within the law. That's it, that so very singular thing that is called the laws of hospitality. Strange plural, plural grammar of two plurals that are different at the same time. One of these two plurals says the laws of hospitality, conditionallaws, etc. The other plural says the antinomic addition, the one that adds conditional laws to the unique and singular and absolutely only great Law of hospitality, to the law of hospitality, to the categorical imperative of hospitality. In this second case, the plural is made up of One + a multiplicity, whereas in the first case, it was only multiplicity, distribution, differentiation. In one case, you have One + n; in the other, n + n + n, etc. (Let us note parenthetically that as a quasi-synonym for "unconditional," the Kantian expression of "categorical imperative" is not unproblematic; we will keep it with some reservations, under erasure, if you like, or under epoche. For to be what it "must" be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be governed by a duty: it is gracious, and "must" not open itself to the guest [invited or visitor], either "conforming to duty" or even, to use the Kantian distinction again, "out of duty." This unconditional law of hospitality, if such a thing is thinkable, would then be a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, in short. For if I practice hospitality "out of duty" [and not only "in conforming with duty"]' this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected.)2