SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 17

SSC CGL - 24 Sep 2025 - Shift 2 • English • Q17

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 [4]?

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A

Explanation

The correct answer is option 1 i.e. ablation.

 

The passage emphasizes the need for an 'unmaking' of the current systems that govern how bodies are understood. It argues for a 'post-identitarian ethics' that favors 'relational indeterminacy' over 'categorical fixity.' The blank requires a word that describes the removal or elimination of 'normativity' (the standards of what is considered 'normal') as the logic that structures our bodies.

Grammatical concept:

  • Ablation: In general and technical contexts, this refers to the surgical removal or the wearing away/destruction of a substance or body part. Philosophically, it is used here to mean the systematic stripping away or elimination of a structuring logic.

  • Unmaking: The very next sentence begins with 'Only through its unmaking...', which serves as a direct synonym and contextual clue for 'ablation.'

Correct word: ablation

Hence, the chosen option is correct.