It has been said that in the highly developed, highly dynamic societies of late modernity the world asks comparatively little of most of us (Beilharz, 2000: 33). By contrast, the world asked, nay, demanded, much of Zygmunt Bauman. But not him alone. His experience was exceptional, but, tragically, not unique. Bauman's was, in many ways, a representative life. Born in 1925 to a Jewish family of Poznan ´, he was 'thrown' into a Poland teeming with nationalist radicalism, a context in which everyday acts of exclusion and persecution were the norm. Still, as the recent works of Izabella Wagner (2020) and Peter Beilharz (2020) show, there is an ineliminable singularity at play here. The world asked much of Zygmunt Bauman, and yet he never took more than was necessary (Wagner, 2020: 339, 396). Indeed, he gave immeasurably more than was asked of him and more than could be expected of any one of us. A prodigious thinker, Bauman authored well over 50 books, many of them bestsellers, and countless essays. His was, by all accounts, an exceedingly generous personality which left a marked impression on many of those with whom he was close. Yet, his remarkable theoretical and personal legacy is not the full extent of Bauman's singularity.Bauman was, perhaps, the thinker of ambivalence par excellence. Ambivalence, he wrote, 'is a language specific disorder: a failure of the naming (segregating) function that language is meant to perform' (Bauman, 1991a: 1). More characteristically, he describes ambivalence as the alter ego of language. As a problem of effective technical management, the conquest of ambivalence, what he terms the 'quest for order', figures,