A law without imperative

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 visitor.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 81-83

An insoluble antinomy

In other words, there would be an antinomy, an insoluble antinomy, a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society, and the State.
[...]

This pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too. The perfectibility of laws is at this cost. And therefore their historicity. And vice versa, conditionallaws 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 oflaw, 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".

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 77-79

Does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome

Does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn a name already given? Does one give hospitality to a subject? to an identifiable subject? to a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 29

A conspiracy of the rich

What sort of justice is it when some aristocrat, goldsmith, moneylender or, for that matter, any such individual who either does nothing at all or else something quite remote from the real needs of the commonwealth, enjoys a life of luxury and elegance thanks to his idleness or his inessential services, while at the same time a labourer, a wagoner, an artisan or farm-worker sweats so hard and so long that a beast of burden could scarcely bear it, and at work so essential that no commonwealth could survive for a year without it; yet they earn such pathetic recompense and live such wretched lives that the condition of beasts actually seems preferable, since beasts don't have to toil without a break and their food is scarcely worse – in fact, to them it's more tasty – nor of they fret about the future. But men like these are compelled for the present to labour that brings scant reward, and are haunted by the prospect of a penniless old age, for their daily wage is so far from meeting their current needs that there's no chance of any surplus being put aside that they might rely on when they're old.

Now isn't it an inequitable and selfish society where such rewards are lavished on the nobility (as they're called), and on goldsmiths and others of that sort, who are either parasites, or flatterers, or purveyors of idle pleasures? And where, by contrast, no decent provision is made for farm-workers, or colliers, or labourers, or carters or artisans, without whom the commonwealth couldn't even function? When their best years have been used up in drudgery, when they are word down by age and sickness and are quite destitute, an ungrateful society, disregarding their long hours of work and the extent of their services, repays them with a wretched death. But there's more: the rich are forever fleecing the poor of some of their daily pittance, not only by private fraud but even by official legislation. In this way what initially seemed an injustice, namely that those who deserved most from the commonwealth received least, has now been converted from an abuse into an act of justice by the passing of a law. So when I survey and assess all the different political systems flourishing today, nothing else presents itself – God help me – but a conspiracy of the rich, who look after their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. They plot and contrive schemes and devices by which, for a start, they can cling on to whatever they have already accumulated by shady means without any fear of losing it, and then take advantage of the poor by acquiring their works and their labour at the lowest possible cost. Once the rich, in the name of the community (and that, of course, includes the poor), have decreed that these fraudulent practices are to be observed, they become laws.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 119-120

We are all robbers

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, to rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 120

The state of exception

Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005) p. 87