The Saboteur: an image-essay

The saboteur emerges from the underground, seeking solitude in dark edges, where carelessness and lack of foresight expose pernicious vulnerabilities. She is the configuration of capital’s question, and, consequently, incapable of escaping its shadow. Her sabotage may prefigure revolution, but it will never be revolutionary. Unlike the Partisan, the saboteur has no “absolute enemies,” and, thus, refuses the comforts of Manichean dichotomy. Instead, as ideal type, she is the scorned traitor; her only antagonist, complicity with the regime’s crimes. Praxis is atonement. Its impossibility compels bitter dissolution. 

The images in this series were produced from medium format negatives, printed using a traditional enlarger, with overlaid direct photogram. Print dimension: 8"x8"

Sources: 

Schmitt suggests "the absolute enemy" is a "configuration of our own question", while Fanon argues that colonial violence produces a necessarily Manichean response. 

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 2004), pp.1-62. 

Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan (Telos Press, 2007), pp.85-95. 

October-November 2025

Note added December 31, 2025: 

I remain dissatisfied with the artist statement above. I was inspired to create this series when I found a kind of conversation emerging between some ideas from Fanon, and some from a late work by Schmitt. I leave it posted as a provisional document, but expect revisions over time will clarify the relationship between the texts, visual "sabotage," and my aesthetic process (in this case, the shattered glass photogram). I suspect that sensory fragmentation provoked by an aesthetic encounter has restorative properties, and thus transcends the categories of "sabotage" and "iconoclasm," though the former may represent important moments in the dialectic of that experience.