Peculiar Satisfaction: Walter Benjamin, Thomas Jefferson and the Angels of History

Presented by Associate Professor Melissa Adler, Faculty of Information and Media Studies.

All are welcome.

Location: StvH 3165

Abstract:

P.S. I am highly pleased with your Declaration. God preserve the United States.
We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the strong.
Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?

—John Page to Thomas Jefferson, 20 July 1776

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.

—Walter Benjamin

The Declaration of Independence was a founding algorithmic statement authored by Thomas Jefferson 250 years ago. It announced, axiomatically, a “we” who hold certain “truths to be self-evident”—an expression that continues to frame the contradictions and limits of American democracy. How can critical theory aid in making sense of the pastness of the present political crisis in the United States, while confronting risks of anachronism, error, and reductionism? In this presentation, Associate Professor Melissa Adler will describe the ways that her interdisciplinary orientation to information studies, social theory, and gender and sexuality studies inform her historical methods. She will talk about how she put theorists including Derrida, Wynter, and Benjamin to use in her research on Thomas Jefferson’s library, archival, and museum practices to understand the paradoxes associated with access to information. She will also show how she formulated a theory of surveillance and datafication based on Jefferson’s land surveys, ledgers, encryption techniques, and information architectures by expanding upon theories of documentation, racial capitalism, empire, and labour.

Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects was published by Fordham University Press in December 2025, and Surveillance in the Empire of Liberty: Why Thomas Jefferson Matters in Our Information Age will be released in late January 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic.

Co-sponsored by FIMS and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism.

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