Ambivalence

Spenser's sarcastic and joking remarks are often misinterpreted as signs of ambivalence and often taken too seriously.

Bonhote also noted the designer's ambivalence about the world he had chosen, clearly expressed in shows like his famous 2001 Voss, in which he forced the assembled fashion world to literally stare at itself for long minutes into a mirrored cube — which in turn represented an insane asylum.

"I dearly loved my master, son," she said. "You should have hated him," I said. "He gave me several sons," she said, "and because I loved my sons I learned to love their father though I hated him too." "I too have become acquainted with ambivalence, I said.

The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism both fall under “allosemitism”: literally Othering the Jew. He defined it not as resentment of what is different, which is xenophobia, but rather of what defies order and clear categories. In 1997, he wrote, “The Jew is ambivalence incarnate. And ambivalence is ambivalence mostly because it cannot be contemplated without ambivalent feeling: it is simultaneously attractive and repelling.”