Abstract
By proposing a new interpretation of The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek, this chapter demonstrates that resisting the anthropological machine depends first and foremost on the practices of reading. My intent is to challenge previous readings of the novel, most of which remove the salamanders as a referent, recoding them through an allegorical key.
However, before being an allegory of colonised people, the working class, Jews, and in the end, even Nazis, the Salamanders should be considered, in narrative terms, as concrete living beings that humans treat as if they were merely natural resources to be studied and exploited. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which traditional interpretations are reductionist and symptomatic of a failure and inability to think beyond humanity, insofar as they persist in placing humans at the centre of the plot, even when confronted by a radically anti-anthropocentric novel that stages the catastrophic consequences of the Anthropocene.
I ground such an interpretation on the analysis of the intertextual references left unexplored in previous readings (Darwin and Kafka), and of two stylistic features neglected by other interpreters, to wit, the frequent inversion between the centre and the margins of the text, and the "surprise effect" created by the concatenation of the narrated events. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which traditional interpretations are reductionist and symptomatic of a failure and inability to think beyond humanity, insofar as they persist in placing humans at the centre of the plot, even when confronted by a radically anti-anthropocentric novel that stages the catastrophic consequences of the Anthropocene.
Despite the ongoing discussion about the beginning of the Anthropocene, the accuracy of its stratigraphic evidence, and the identity of the Anthropos at stake in the neologism, there is broad consensus in the scientific community about the anthropogenic nature of current climate change. The anthropogenic factors of climate change are undoubtedly intrinsic to industrialization and the development of capitalism on a global scale.
By contrast, they perfectly inform us on the functioning of the anthropological machine, namely the device allowing the recognition of the human through the articulation of a fundamental dichotomy between the human and the animal, simultaneously inside and outside the very category of human.