“Animali-Umani e Non- nel Capitalocene: La Gallina di Reparto di Calvino”

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between anthropomorphism and animalization in Italo Calvino’s short story The workshop hen (1958). Through this double narrative movement, the hen and the workers are reduced to their essential productive function, becoming vulnerable and dispensable in the factory line. Despite this similarity, it is possible to distinguish a hierarchical relationship between the worker and hen, in which the former takes advantage of the latter by creating a chain of exploitation in which it occupies the lowest step. The essay shows, how human and non-human animals are grouped but at the same time divided into this typically «Capitalocenic» process of industrial exploitation. Finally, an analysis of metaphors like the «trained gorilla» [the metaphor of the «trained gorilla» is attributed to Frederick W. Taylor by André Philip in Le Problème ouvrier aux Etats-Unis (1927) and re-appropriated by Antonio Gramsci in his note on «Americanism and Fordism» (Prison Notebooks, Notebook 4, § 51)] shows how animalization and the dehumanization in the factory line have been central in the Italian Marxist critique since the beginning of the Italian industrialization process.