Invisible Resistance of Chickens

Abstract

The article pursues two interrelated objectives: first, to determine how a political theory that includes nonhuman animals (as specialists refer to all animals other than humans) can be constructed; and second, to demonstrate how those animals who are forcibly concealed may nonetheless exert influence on the ordinary political order. As its theoretical framework, the article employs Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, which makes it possible to articulate the political manifestation of nonhuman animals and to expand the very understanding of “the political” beyond human institutions, language, and practices of representation. It is argued that animals are not passive subjects awaiting inclusion in the political community; rather, they insist upon it in multiple ways, enacting forms of agency that cannot be reduced to normative models of representation or incorporation into already existing political structures. The invisibility of the industrial-scale exploitation of nonhuman animals is interpreted not as an absence of the political but as a specific mode of its extraordinary manifestation — one capable of exerting material and affective pressure on the stability of the ordinary order. Particular attention is given to the example of the invisible resistance of chickens, expressed through the phenomenon of avian influenza. This resistance does not take the form of direct bodily action; nevertheless, it destabilizes social, economic, and political processes, pointing to the cruelty and injustice embedded in prevailing human–nonhuman relations. Through an analysis of the animal industrial complex as a hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s sense, alongside zoonotic diseases and urban metabolism, the article demonstrates that even forcibly concealed nonhuman actors are capable of intervening in the organization of the common world, exposing its vulnerability and underscoring the interdependence of multispecies coexistence.