Gillian Rose's difficult project seeks to rehabilitate reason and critique. For Rose, both the ‘enlightened reason’ of liberalism and the abandonment of reason by postmodernism refuse to do the difficult work of the middle and, thus, in their different ways, invalidate critique. Critique has, at its foundation, an engagement with embedded actuality – with the broken middle and its institutions – and with our role as agents within ‘the law and its commotion’.

Rose's speculative philosophy is emphatically against ignorance. It struggles towards comprehension of the gap between the promises of modern law and the social and political actuality in which they are situated. This pursuit of comprehension is not an objective exercise in immanent critique; it struggles always towards comprehension of our selves, of our own roles in promoting and sustaining injustice. In this sense, Rose's philosophy is against innocence. She insists that it is ‘possible to mean well, to be caring and kind … yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions’. We cannot engage in critique and remain ‘strangers to ourselves as moral agents’; we must turn our gaze inwards, to our own complicity, alongside investigation of the diremptions of modern law.

A speculative investigation of the ‘fate of modern law’ does not purport to fully comprehend the diremption between law and morality, promise and actuality; it struggles towards comprehension, but acknowledges that any understanding is inevitably partial and fraught with inevitable gaps and fissures.