Tender is the Flesh

A Freudian Reading of Choi Jin-young’s Hunger

Abstract

Cannibalism has long functioned as a metaphor for love, circulating across cultural, religious, and popular imaginaries, where images such as the pomegranate and the vampire have linked acts of consumption to intimacy, desire, transgression, binding love to food through the language of excess and incorporation. This essay offers a psychoanalytic reading of Choi Jin-young's Hunger that foregrounds food as the novel's central site for negotiating grief, desire, and death. Rather than approaching cannibalism as a mere aberration, it argues that eating operates as an affective bodily logic through which the text dismantles dominant narratives of love, survival, and futurity. Drawing on Freudian theories of melancholia and dialectics between Eros-Thanatos, the analysis demonstrates how hunger in the novel exceeds the restorative function of nourishment, emerging instead as a compulsive practice that sustains attachment to loss. Through Dam's consumption of her dead lover, Hunger collapses the distinction between care-destruction, intimacy- self-erasure, private mourning-social rites, revealing how desire persists not despite death but through it, and reimagining love as a melancholic fidelity to what cannot be recovered. Ultimately, situating the novel within the broader socioeconomic landscape of disposability and deprivation, it further contends that Dam's grief is not merely individual but structurally produced.