SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 16

SSC CGL - 24 Sep 2025 - Shift 2 • English • Q16

In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank.

To conceive of gender as ontologically prior or naturally originary is to misrecognize its status as a [1] ________, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration across spatial, legal, and psychic apparatuses. Within this regime, embodiment is not merely lived but mediated—filtered through hermeneutic technologies that valorize some corporealities while rendering others abject, deviant, or structurally unintelligible. The state, in tandem with biomedical epistemes and juridico-political grammars, exercises a necropolitical calibration of life itself—where recognition is not a right but a [2] ________ allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible. This deposit if renders gender a function of discursive legibility rather than biological inevitability. Resistance, when funneled through these grammars, risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert. Hence, the radical task is not merely to 'expand' recognition but to effect a [3] ________ of recognition's ontological architecture. This entails refusing the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that liberal frameworks offer and instead exposing their constitutive foreclosure of alterity. Such a politics necessitates the [4] ________ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment. Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned—one that privileges contingency over coherence, opacity over transparency, and relational indeterminacy over categorical fixity. In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] ________—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.

What should come in the place of blank number [3]?

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is option 2 i.e. destitution.

 

The passage calls for a radical transformation of how 'recognition' is structured. It argues against simply 'expanding' existing systems and instead suggests a fundamental breaking down or stripping away of the current 'ontological architecture' (the basic nature or foundation) of how society recognizes individuals.

Grammatical concept:

  • Destitution: While commonly used to mean extreme poverty, in a philosophical or formal context, it refers to the state of being 'destitute' of something—meaning the deprivation, stripping away, or abandonment of a particular structure or quality.

  • Ontological Architecture: This refers to the fundamental framework of being. To 'effect a destitution' of this architecture means to dismantle or vacate the existing rules that govern who is considered 'real' or 'intelligible.'

Correct word: destitution

Hence, the chosen option is correct.