“He could not fucking die”: le tie-game dans Sabbath’s Theater de Philip Roth

Organized as a diptych to reproduce the inner organization of the novel, the present article aims to show that Sabbath’s Theater stages a fight between Eros and Thanatos that apparently results in an unexpected tie-game of a nature to challenge many a theoretical aesthetic and psychoanalytical assumption. The energies of the Love Instinct are pit up against the forces of the Death Drive in the arena of a constant confrontation of harrowing obscenity and transgression juxtaposed with distressing representations of the haunting of death and forebodings of suicide. Highly destabilizing, the text thus locks its reader in a theater of rejection and sympathy that does not leave him/her unscathed, and ultimately produces an experiment in form that helps understand why Roth considered it his best achievement.