I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse. It is a constitutive feature of law that it ‘thinks itself as right,’ and this makes it unable to recognize the outside on which it depends (Kerruish 2025, 5). Although the specific injustices that result from colonial legal practices form a part of the analysis (building on her earlier Jurisprudence as Ideology [Kerruish 1991]), the overall focus on the constitutive wrong of law means that law’s empirical wrongs play an illustrative, thus secondary, role (primarily in chapter 5). As Kerruish frames it, the wrong of law is an internal quality prior to any external effects that this or that legal regime might have: ‘The idea of the wrong of law… is a metaphysical/logical idea’ (Kerruish 2025, 6). Coming to terms with law’s inability to think itself wrong, and thus to surprise itself, requires engaging with its metaphysical and logical character, leading Kerruish to draw on theories of right in 19^th century German philosophy as much as on innovations in mathematical logic in the early 20^th century. While Hegel’s Science of Logic and Marx’s chapter on commodity fetishism stopped short of recognizing the implications of law’s self-claimed necessity, the mathematical turn in logic testified in a different way to the limitations of the two dialecticians’ shared narrative, since it showed the impossibility of grounding logic on an absolute foundation. The wrong of law is scarcely expressible, therefore, within any of the methods adopted by these thinkers: ‘Like the absurdity which Marx named ‘fetishism’, it is an idea that begins from a felt, sensed wrong. Brought to expression, it is not that of a society in which things control people rather than people controlling things. It would rather be the sensed wrong of thought stuck in a double failure; a failure of the universality classically attributed to laws of thought and a failure to comprehend that failure’ (Kerruish 2025, 9). 

            Given its orientation, I found this book’s focus on Marx’s commodity fetishism both fitting and limiting. Fitting, since the opening chapter of Capital, Volume 1 is where Marx’s argument bears the closest relationship to Hegel’s Science of Logic, as many commentaries have noticed. When he transitions from discussing the double character of the commodity (as value and use-value as the form of value) to ‘commodity fetishism’, Marx’s use of religious imagery sets up the movement of commodities as a ‘power of artifice which is unknown to the artificer’ (Kerruish 2025, 82). ‘In rejecting Hegel’s logical dialectic’, she writes, ‘Marx disarmed himself in the face of his own apprehension of that very excess of thought that haunts logics of the understanding: an apprehension pursued in terms of the revealing/concealing functions of form’ (Kerruish 2025, 54).  Departing from Hegel’s attempt to ground logic in the movement of thought, Marx’s commodity fetishism designates the quasi-religious power of commodities as logic’s ‘other’ – that irrational appeal to spiritual forces threatening all attempts to apprehend ‘the wrong of law’. 

            On the other hand, this focus on the ‘secret’ of commodity fetishism is limiting, not least because it downplays another of Capital’s ‘secrets’: that of original accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation]. I wonder how productive Kerruish’s reading of Marx can be without attention to this other end of Capital’s first volume, since these chapters are clearly quite closely related to the terms of her analysis. Because this final part of the work develops an analysis of the historical and political conditions enabling capital’s ascendancy, it is very difficult to separate its logical dimensions from its historical and political ones. While Marx is interested in understanding the logic of capital, he definitively rules out the possibility that this logic could be given a free-standing foundation. Because capital as a total social process has a non-logical (historical, political, and colonial) basis, it becomes clearer why Hegel’s Science of Logic cannot be the exclusive model (much less foil) of Marx’s text. The ‘wrong of law’ from this perspective, is the unacknowledged presupposition of capital formation, and it continues indefinitely after capital’s formation. It is a form of nonidentity that underlies the supposed abstract realm of exchange, the ‘anything but idyllic’ outside of the system that maintains it (Marx 1990, 874), but which is incapable of being assimilated to it.

            Seen from this side, the distinctive thing about Marx’s mature work is not its attempt to give a univocal or ‘pure’ discourse of capital’s inner logic, but rather to simultaneously comprehend the inner features of this logic and its historico-political outside. This is also the significance of the end of Part Two, where Marx describes the need to descend from the ‘sphere of simple circulation’ into the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx 1990, 279). The wrong of capital’s logic, to put it in Kerruish’s terms, is on full display in the often-neglected – but extremely informative – chapters on ‘The Working Day’ and ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’. If we see Capital in this way, the basic question is less about whether it is primarily conceptual or historical, but rather how these interlocking aspects work together. This distinctive feature of the text is the reason that Massimiliano Tomba has referred to the ‘impure method’ of Capital (Tomba 2025). This aspect of Marx’s argument seems to bring Capital much closer to Kerruish’s project – with its disavowal of a single ‘method’ (Kerruish 2025, 5) and related combination of heterogenous traditions – than the latter might let on. 

            In closing, I also found myself wondering whether Theodor W. Adorno’s thought might bear an affinity with Kerruish’s investigation of the wrong of law. Although Adorno never systematically analyzed law as such, he did seek to account for the force of logical categories and their dependence on an unrecognized, nonidentical outside. In a formulation strikingly similar to some of Kerruish’s, he describes ‘negative dialectics’ as ‘the effort to go beyond the concept, by means of the concept’ (Adorno 2001, 29). Like Kerruish, Adorno’s development of the ‘consistent consciousness of nonidentity’ (Adorno 2001, 16), follows a felt need (Kerruish 2025, 4), an embodied awareness of the inner failure of logical form. If critique must give voice to a sensed wrong, but cannot shed the medium of the concept, Adorno suggests that the way forward is to develop the dominant forms of conceptuality to the extreme point at which we experience their falsity. Perhaps the provocation here is that the wrong of law cannot properly be separated from the untruth of ‘the whole’ (Adorno 1974), and that the latter’s expression requires new forms of philosophical presentation. What Marx, Adorno, and Kerruish share is a concern to illuminate the historical suffering encoded in the glittering appearance of the world of commodities, as well as a suspicion of a single, unified method. In developing an impure, internally heterogenous account of law’s relationship to its other, Valerie Kerruish’s last work has provided a thought-provoking contribution to this broader project.

Iaan Reynolds is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, U.S.A.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. 1974 [1951]. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso.

Adorno, Theodor W. 2001 [1966]. Negative Dialectics. Translated by Dennis Redmond. https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/Negative_Dialectics_Redmondtrans2021.pdf

Kerruish, Valerie. 2025. The Wrong of Law: Metaphysics, Logics and Law’s Claim of Right. Edited by Uwe Petersen. London: Routledge.

Kerruish, Valerie. 1991. Jurisprudence as Ideology. London: Routledge.

Marx, Karl. 1990 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. 

Tomba, Massimiliano. 2025. “Il metodo impuro nel Capitale di Marx,” Bollettino Filosofico 40: 203-220.