Over at the blog "History | Sexuality | Law," Katharina Isabel Schmidt, a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University and a JSD candidate in law at the Yale Law School, has posted Theodor Sternberg and the Closet of Conceptualism. The essay commences:
Sometime in the mid-1930s, German jurist Theodor Sternberg (1878-1950) concluded that law and love were incompatible. In one of his “erotosophical” fragments, he claimed that affective bonds thrived under anarchy. Love, for Sternberg had to be free from egoism and compulsion, eschew both duty and obligation. “Coitus,” especially, was divine in origin—God’s love for the world incarnate—and just like God’s love was limitless, sexuality knew no law.
--Dan Ernst
