cadaverize

C3A1D2A1V4E1R1I1Z10E1

verb

To remove the life from or to make cadaverous.

Scrabble 25

Meanings

verbcadaverize (third-person singular simple present cadaverizes, present participle cadaverizing, simple past and past participle cadaverized)

present singular third person cadaverizes · participle present cadaverizing · participle past cadaverized · past cadaverized · alternative cadaverise

  1. To remove the life from or to make cadaverous.

    The desire to analyse the 'absolute eye' and its tendency to 'cadaverize' has also been a central concern in work by the white South African artist Penny Siopsis.

    2008, Tony Bennett, John Frow, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis
    3 more examples

    Yet it is only by having the analyst "cadaverize" herself, as Lacan said, by making her "a total [and therefore absent] presence," that space can be created for the subject's assumption of her own story, for her coming to terms with her own desire.

    1993, Lahcen Haddad, Narrative, Desire and Historicity, page 269

    In a way, the burial marker is an ideal metaphor for the signifiers that simultaneously immortalize and cadaverize the subject, situating subjectivity outside the material flux of transient, tangible being by condensing its essential identity into a different "material" register altogether (i.e., into elements of a symbolic order that both precedes the individuals existence and persists after his or her vanishing).

    2008, Adrian Johnston, Zizek's Ontology, page 50

    I have noted that throughout La vie la mort Derrida calls attention to this "programming machine," a machine that operates effectively to auto-reproduce biological, political, and pedagogical sameness and that in so doing, attempts to reify (“cadaverize”) the living body and the living body of language (for this, see especially Derrida's “Nietzsche and the Machine”).

    2019, Dawne McCance, The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida's La vie la mort, page 65

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

cadaverize. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cadaverize

MLA

“cadaverize.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cadaverize. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “cadaverize,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cadaverize.

Source: cadaverize on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.