There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but correspondence. One climbs, and finds oneself where one began. In The Wrong of Law, Valerie Kerruish identifies a comparable motif at the heart of modern rationality. Across Hegel’s identity of method and content, Marx’s definition of value as a self-reproducing abstraction, Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic, and Gödel’s incompleteness proofs, she traces a single architectonic problem: the attempt of a system to ground itself from within.

The trajectory of The Wrong of Law is organised around what Kerruish calls “thought surprising itself”: the moment in which a system that seeks to secure its own foundation discovers that its ground cannot be established without remainder. In her reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic, this tension appears in the claim that method is not external to logic but identical with the self-movement of its content. Logic must justify itself by exhibiting its own necessity. Exposition and object must coincide: the presentation of the system must be the very unfolding of what it claims to ground. The difficulty emerges where Hegel’s system appears to rely upon determinations not fully generated within its own movement, such as the disclosure of “method” at the end of his Logic. The aspiration to immanent self-determination risks exposing a gap between logic as object and logic as its own exposition and justification.

In Marx’s Capital, the problem reappears in another register. His critique of political economy seeks to demystify value as a real abstraction constituted through social practice. Yet the concept of fetishism, as The Wrong of Law argues, may introduce a reflexive complication: the disclosure of the commodity form must explain how social relations appear as properties of things without reintroducing a hidden essence behind appearances. For Kerruish, this signals another instance of thought encountering its limit — the critique of illusion shadowed by the persistence of metaphysical residues. She concludes that Marx’s inversion of Hegel may not be consistent as it is still haunted by Feuerbachian projections of anthropological essences and quasi-religious idols.

In the twentieth century, the ambition of formal logic to secure arithmetic through purely logical foundations intensifies this problem. Frege’s reduction of number to logical extension sought absolute formal grounding; Russell’s paradox revealed the instability of unrestricted self-reference; Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrated that any sufficiently powerful formal system cannot prove its own consistency from within. Here the “surprise” is exact and technical: formal systems generate truths that exceed their own deductive closure. Across dialectical logic, critique of value, and mathematical formalism, Kerruish identifies a shared structural predicament: the attempt at self-grounding produces circularity, excess, or incompleteness precisely at the point where necessity is asserted.

The scope of this synthesis is remarkable. Few works attempt, with such determination, to think Hegelian dialectics, Marxian value theory, and modern formal logic within a single conceptual frame. Kerruish refuses rigid disciplinary compartmentalisation. She treats Hegel and Marx as serious philosophers of form rather than ideologues of totality, and approaches Frege and Gödel not as isolated technicians but as participants in a broader drama of reflexivity. It is this architectonic ambition that ultimately permits her to turn to law.

The book situates juridical authority within this genealogy of self-foundation. Law appears not as the neutral application of rules but as a structure that must continuously reproduce its own authority while unable fully to justify it from within its own normative terms. The “wrong” of law thus names not merely injustice but the structural instability of its claim to rational self-legitimation. In Chapter 5, Kerruish illustrates this structure through her discussion of Australian colonial jurisprudence, particularly the High Court’s decision in Kartinyeri v Commonwealth (1998). There, the Court was asked to determine whether the constitutional “race power” could be used to withdraw legal protections from Aboriginal sacred land. The judges sought to ground their reasoning in constitutional principle, yet the authority of that principle itself could not be justified apart from the legal order it was invoked to secure. As Kerruish shows, juridical legitimacy rests upon a circular structure: the legal system grounds its authority in the very process through which that authority is asserted. The wrong of law thus resides not only in the injustice of dispossession, but in the self-referential form through which law establishes its own validity.

Yet the difficulty, to my mind, lies precisely in posing the question of grounding as the determinate problem of legitimation. Self-grounding systems necessarily produce antinomies, contradictions, and paradoxes. Hegel did not solve this problem by eliminating circularity; he transformed it. His transition from metaphysics to logic meant that the question of transcendental foundation resolved itself in immanent temporal development. The identity of method and content is not an after-the-fact reconciliation but the unfolding of thought grasping itself as the result of its own historical development. That the unity of method and thought becomes explicit only at the end of the Logic does not necessarily signal a gap between exposition and performance; it marks the moment at which the self-reflexive movement has completed itself. Only then thought and method become transparent to themselves. To fragment Hegel’s logic into object and justification risks reintroducing precisely the dualism his dialectic was meant to overcome.

Marx radicalises Hegel’s immanence. The contradictions of political economy are not failures of thought attempting to ground itself; they are necessary effects of capitalist social relations. Abstraction does not precede exchange; it arises from it. Fetishism names the necessarily socially objective illusions not as false appearances covering an essential truth, but as collectively enforced actualisations of objective class consciousness. These abstractions are not false appearances; they are real insofar as individuals mutually enforce them upon one another in practice. Nonetheless, they are “wrong” because individuals cannot freely emerge from these relations as self-determining subjects. The paradox is not resolved at the level of logic but through class struggle. What logic cannot reconcile, power will decide.

What is at stake in Kerruish interpretive choices in The Wrong of Law is not the question of exegetical fidelity but the architecture of the book’s central claim. If Hegel’s belated articulation of method in the Logic is understood as an unresolved act of self-justification, and if Marx’s account of fetishism is framed as reopening a metaphysical tension between illusion and essence, then both dialectical immanence and real abstraction can be redescribed as variations of the same structural theme: systems that fail fully to ground themselves. In that case, the analogy between dialectic, value, and formal incompleteness no longer describes a shared failure of grounding but distinct transformations of what grounding itself means. 

Here the image of Escher’s staircase reappears. The anxiety that animates the book is not ordinary dependence — not the fact that systems rely on presuppositions — but the more ambitious demand for ultimate, metalogical self-grounding. It is this demand that produces the vertigo of circularity. One ascends in search of secure foundations, only to discover that the ascent itself presupposes what it seeks to establish. The staircase closes upon itself.

Yet the wrong of law may not lie in this architectonic closure. Law has rarely claimed the kind of self-demonstrating necessity that formal logic sought for arithmetic. Its authority has rested instead on sovereignty, institutional violence, colonization, moral narrative, historical contingency, and force. To insist on exposing its lack of ultimate foundation risks mistaking a philosophical desire — the desire for metalogical legitimacy — for a political necessity. The staircase may be a powerful image of conceptual self-reference; it is less clear that the wrong disclosed at that height can resolve the injustice from which it arises. However, the aim of the book, as Kerruish herself acknowledges, is not to offer a normative solution to injustice. Quite the contrary, it shows that no system of norms can produce its own legitimacy in any absolute sense. This is the deeply unsettling force of Kerruish’s critique of law, and the source of the vertigo it produces. It is precisely this uncompromising gaze into the abyss of normativity that gives The Wrong of Law its radical brilliance.

In sum, like Escher’s impossible staircases, The Wrong of Law compels its audience to inhabit the structure it depicts. One ascends through dialectic, through value theory, through the austere landscapes of formal logic, only to encounter the recursive demand for foundation that the argument itself interrogates. At this point, Kerruish’s own guiding motif of “thought surprising itself” acquires an unexpected reflexivity. The effect is dizzying — not because argumentation falters, but because it is pursued with relentless precision.

In so doing, the book stages, with uncommon intellectual courage, the tragedy of modern rationality confronting its own limits. That drama may not exhaust the “wrong” of law — but it renders visible the structural tension between legitimacy and self-justification in a way few works attempt. The result is a dazzling, demanding book which invites its reader, above all, to relinquish the fear of heights – and to confront the structure that makes the fall unavoidable. 

Esther Edelmann is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Leiden University, The Netherlands.