The Joy of Devouring

Metabolism, Desire, and Subjectivity in Satoshi Kon’s "Paprika"

Abstract

This article performs a phenomenological analysis of Satoshi Kon’s anime film Paprika (2006) focusing on dreaming, devouring, bodily permeability, and transformation of subjectivity. While dining has long been a significant motif in Japanese cinema, eating and the metabolic body have seldom been considered serious topics in philosophy. When mentioned, they are usually seen as mere conditions for thinking or, in phenomenology, for moving around. Although Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later work on dreams and intersubjectivity moves beyond the bounded subject, it remains primarily concerned with perception and relationality rather than material exchanges. Annemarie Mol’s critique of impermeable embodiment highlights this limitation, arguing that not only movement but also metabolism should be the focus of phenomenology. An exception in Western philosophy is Emmanuel Levinas whose philosophy of hunger challenges the idea that consumption is a purely biological function, instead reframing it as a type of existential desire. Through these interventions, Paprika emerges as a model of metabolic subjectivity, where eating, dreaming, and transformation are not separate processes but interwoven modes of becoming. The film visually enacts this by collapsing the boundaries between dream and reality, self and environment, culminating in a climax where bodily devouring is both an act of love and metamorphosis. By reinterpreting Merleau-Ponty through Mol’s metabolic perspective and Levinas’s hunger, this article argues that Paprika presents a vision of subjectivity that is radically open, absorptive, and continually reshaped by what it takes in. In doing so, Paprika not only challenges phenomenology’s emphasis on perception but also enacts a flattening of distinctions between body and mind, material and virtual, fundamentally redefining what it means to exist in an immanent world.