On Ambivalence, Otherness, and the Failure of Redemption
The way I write is the way I perceive the world.
Not as a system of clear opposites, not as a morally ordered landscape, but as something fundamentally ambiguous. For me, there is no stable good and no unambiguous evil. These terms presuppose distinctions I do not find in reality. What I perceive instead is ambivalence — not as an exception, but as a basic condition.
Perception, for me, is not a neutral registration of the world. It is always bound, perspectival, permeated with history, body and expectation. It does not organise, it does not make clean distinctions, it does not resolve. It does not produce moral clarity, but rather overlaps of meaning.
This ambivalence is not an intellectual concept I have adopted. It is the way in which the world presents itself to me. Decisions always carry several meanings simultaneously. Actions are never unambiguously interpretable. Motives shift depending on perspective. And every interpretation remains provisional.
That is why the concept of redemption does not work for me either. Redemption presupposes a goal, an endpoint, an ‘outside’ from which it can be judged whether something has been ‘resolved’. It presupposes that there is a state that can be attained — and that someone or something recognises this state. In a world that I experience only as fragmented, perspectival and contradictory, redemption is not a broken promise, but a category that leads nowhere.
The situation is similar with gratitude, only in the opposite direction. It too implies an order in which something can be clearly assigned: gift and giver, cause and effect. But my perception does not follow such a clear line. What happens to me is rarely simply good or bad. It is something that shapes me, unsettles me, changes me – often all at once.
I carry this attitude into my writing. Not as a thesis, not as a message, but as a structure. My texts do not seek to resolve anything. They do not lead to a moral conclusion. They do not end in clarity. Instead, they revolve around an uneasy feeling: the feeling that something is not right, without being able to say what it is.
My texts do not prescribe a single interpretation. Nor do they prevent interpretations from emerging. A particular reading may take hold. Multiple readings may coexist. Sometimes, an effect that does not immediately lend itself to interpretation is sufficient.
The text begins to resist where interpretation is meant to become closure: when other possibilities are ruled out, or when the text itself is expected to yield a single, unambiguous reading. An interpretation may be valid. It need not bring the text to a close.
This feeling arises prior to language. It is an irritation at the level of perception itself. Language does not enter my work as an instrument of explanation, but as an attempt to make this irritation perceptible without betraying it. For me, writing does not mean eliminating uncertainty, but giving it a form in which it can be endured.
Central to this is the realisation that perception always arises within the individual. Two people may experience the same situation – they will never perceive the same thing. Not because one of them is wrong, but because perception is not a neutral process. It is tied to history, body, fear, hope, experience.
The desire to find the same thing in another person — the same view, the same meaning, the same truth — is human. But structurally, it is doomed to fail. And it is precisely at this point that otherness arises.
To me, other people’s thoughts and behaviour always have something strange about them. Something that cannot be fully grasped. This otherness is ambivalent: it fascinates because it opens up spaces I do not know myself. And it is frightening because it reminds me that understanding is never complete. Closeness does not arise in spite of this otherness, but within it – and often fails precisely where we seek to resolve it.
My writing navigates this tension. It is not an attempt to establish understanding where understanding is not possible. Nor is it a retreat into detachment. It is an attempt to remain honest in the face of a perception that knows no definitive answers.
All communication is a revelation of one’s own identity. Whoever writes reveals how they see, where they do not resolve, where they come to a halt. The intensity with which I am willing to look at myself – without saving myself, without promising myself redemption – I carry into my texts. I do not invite readers to follow me or agree with me. I invite them to consider, for a moment, how it feels not to resolve ambivalence immediately.
For me, literature thus becomes a place where perception does not have to be normalised. A place where the failure of unambiguity is not treated as a deficit, but as reality. My texts offer no answers. But they take their readers seriously enough not to provide them with false ones.
What remains is not comfort.
But perhaps something else: the realisation that this uneasy feeling, this sense that something is not right, this lack of clarity, is not a personal failure. But one possible, honest view of the world.